This newly established Centre for Doctoral Training provides a world-leading post-graduate education in Fluid Mechanics that breaks down the traditional barriers between different disciplines, with seven departments and over 60 academics involved. The Centre will train 75 PhD students in the next five years.

Former Director of the CDT Prof. Christos Vassilicos explains: “the CDT is predicated on the view that the subdivision of Fluid Mechanics by department and application area is artificial and not conducive to producing the best doctoral candidates. The core programme focuses on the concepts and techniques that underlie the discipline to create truly multidisciplinary training practised on state-of-the-art applications.”

The Centre, hosted at Imperial College London, currently has eighteen industrial partners that have declared their support for the CDT and offered to contribute studentships, part studentships, and a variety of benefits in kind including internships and commitment of time and expert manpower to teaching and project supervision.

Fluid Dynamics at Imperial College London

Imperial College London is consistently ranked in the top 10 of Universities worldwide. Fluid Dynamics is one of Imperial College’s strengths, with Fluid Mechanics groups active in all seven Departments contributing to the CDT, and 60 research-active supervisors. Virtually every aspect of fluid mechanics is covered: microfluidics, combustion, aerodynamics, turbulence, multi-phase flow, flow in porous media, wave processes, flow control, biological fluid mechanics, environmental fluid mechanics and geophysical fluid mechanics. The research funding from EPSRC for fluid mechanics across Imperial currently exceeds £60M.

Imperial has outstanding facilities and laboratories, a wealth of links with UK and multi-national companies, and collaborations with national laboratories and world-class international institutions. Furthermore, it has an award-winning transferrable skills programme, has already funded an internal network to co-ordinate its Fluid Dynamics community, and is able to recruit large numbers of excellent PhD students.

The three pillars

Training is centred on three key thematic 'pillars': aerodynamics, multiphase flows (including micro-flows), and fluid-surface/structure interactions. These pillars have been chosen to unify a wide range of seemingly different applications through shared analytical, computational and experimental methods; they are a guiding principle to understand the commonalities underlying disparate phenomena and to exploit these in research on emerging and novel technologies.

Aeronautics Aerodynamics

Aircraft, Cars, Trains, Jet and internal- combustion engines, Wind turbines, Fans, Ventilation, Cooling/heating, Gas transport, Pollutant dispersion, Nasal and lung flows, Atmospheric flows.

 

Microfluids Microflows

Micro-fluidic devices, Micro-UAVs, Lubricating films, Cooling in electronics, Folding and mixing in food processing and paints, Capillary blood flow, Oil, slurry, polymer transport in small pipes, Jet printing, Hydrocarbon, water, CO2, contaminant flow in porous media.

 

Fluid surface interaction Fluid-surface interactions

Coating films, Cardiovascular flows, Transport of particles, liquid droplets, and bubbles, Sprays, Fuel evaporation and combustion in burners, car and jet engines, Flooding and run-off, Fracking, Coastal waves and energy conversion

Admissions

The Fluids CDT is unfortunately no longer recruiting students to the programme.