About me

I'm Hugh Bird, a post-graduate research student at the University of Glasgow working with Dr. Ramesh on low order aerodynamics.

Modern engineering is increasingly concerned with the non-linear aerodynamics of wings. Problem is, whether you're trying to investigate the flight of a bumble-bee or the aeroelastics of a flexible aeroplane, CFD is slow. Prohibitively slow. And that's before you've found someone with the necessary expertise to produce a meaningful case. An undergraduate engineer is going to struggle.

The idea then is to explicitly model the important phenomena within a domain, rather than to implicitly model everything as occurs in CFD. This means that wings can be treated as thin and viscosity neglected. The lack of viscosity leads to the pickle of how to shed vorticity, such that a wing can create lift. For many kinematics, the Kutta-Joukowski theorem suffices. But the most interesting cases, we're interested in the leading edge vortex, its formation and how it affects the lift produced by a wing. LEV shedding is anticipated using leading shedding criterion.

• Applying inviscid linear unsteady lifting-line theory to viscous large-amplitude problems, H.J.A. Bird, K. Ramesh, S. Otomo & I.M. Viola, For submission to AIAA Journal. Pre-print.
• Unsteady lifting-line theory and the influence of wake vorticity on aerodynamic loads, H.J.A. Bird & K. Ramesh, In review, Theoretical and Computational Dynamics. Pre-print.
• Leading edge vortex formation on finite wings using vortex particles, H.J.A. Bird, K. Ramesh, S. Otomo & I.M. Viola, AIAA Scitech 2021 Forum, Virtual Event. Pre-print. Presentation.
• A Geometrically Non-Linear Time-Domain Unsteady Lifting-Line Theory, H.J.A. Bird, S. Otomo, K. Ramesh & I.M. Viola, AIAA Scitech 2019 Forum, San Diego. Pre-print.
• Theoretical and Computational Studies of a Rectangular Finite Wing Oscillating in Pitch and Heave, H.J.A. Bird & K. Ramesh, 6th European Conference on Computational Mechanics (ECCM 6) 7th European Conference on Computational Fluid Dynamics (ECFD 7), 2018. Pre-print.

• C programming
• Aeroelasticity

• CVortex: Accelerated vortex particle methods. C/OpenCL/OpenMP.
• CVortex.jl: Julia bindings for CVortex.
• LiftingLineTheory.jl Low order methods for the analysis of aerofoils and wings. Julia.
• BSV Small vectors. Header-only C.
• [fork]Vcpkg Cross-platform build tool. Fork includes ports for BSV & HBTK.
• [depreciated] HBTK: Scientific programming generic library inc. quadrature, geometry, meshes, IO, interpolation, plotting, aerofoil geometry generation & integral remaps. C++.
• [depreciated] pflows: Potential flows. C++.

• [Master's project / abandonware] HT3 solver: hyperbolic tangent function enriched (XFEM) boundary cooling code including simplified radiation model. Python.

• Potential flow
• Lifting-line theory
• Vortex particle methods
• Leading-edge vortices
• High-performance & GPGPU computing
• Programming(C, C++, MATLAB, Julia, Python)
• Solar car racing
• Model aeroplanes