From rockets and satellites to hydrogen-powered aircraft and the future of clean fuel containment and production, a wide range of modern technologies depend on accurately modelling how liquids and gases behave together when they flow. Known as multiphase liquid–gas flow, this phenomenon remains a notable weakness in even the best commercial software. The Chair in Industrial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is dedicated to changing this, developing the mathematical and computational tools to model these flows with far greater accuracy and speed. Based within the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the Chair’s work has direct relevance to aerospace innovation, the decarbonisation of air travel, cryogenic shipping and Southern Africa’s strategic investment in green hydrogen manufacturing.

A flagship outcome of the Chair’s work is AlphaFlow, a novel CFD software suite developed in-house and built on fundamental research in applied mathematics. The software is already licensed by several international universities as well as premier industries such as Airbus UK, Airbus Germany and Airbus India. It is now available to the wider international market through a UCT spin-off company Elemental Numerics that has also secured contracts with major players in the shipping industry. The work spans the full spectrum from mathematically foundational research to commercial software development and applied engineering problem-solving.