IACM Colloquium
Seminar title:
High-fidelity and Real-time Simulation of Aerial Firefighting for Wildfires
Speaker:
Dr Tao Zhang,
Lecturer in Flight Sciences (Assistant Professor),
CFD Laboratory, James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow,
taozhang@glasgow.ac.uk
Abstract:
Wildfires are raging around the world as climate change intensifies, especially in southern Europe and the US. Aerial firefighting plays a key role in combating wildfires, but these are obviously extremely complex and dangerous missions. The lack of understanding and adequate training tools often compromises mission effectiveness and, quite often, leads to additional damage.
This seminar presents a novel high-fidelity real-time simulation capability for helicopter aerial firefighting for wildfires, developed at the CFD Laboratory (www.gla.ac.uk/cfd), University of Glasgow. This novel development leverages cutting-edge GPU-accelerated Lattice Boltzmann Methods for fully-coupled and faster-than-real-time fire-atmosphere aircraft-water modelling. Combined with our full-motion flight simulator, Daedalus I, we enabled realistic pilot-in-the-loop aerial fighting modelling for highly complex and dynamic wildfire scenarios.
This seminar will outline the innovations in methodologies, algorithms, and hardware, as well as new findings in wildfire-wake dynamics, aircraft-plume interactions, and pilot training. The presentation will also briefly introduce future directions towards training, autonomous operation, and sim-real interfacing for live wildfire monitoring and management.
Short CV:
Tao Zhang
PhD, MRAeS, FHEA
Lecturer in Flight Sciences
Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, www.gla.ac.uk/cfd
Autonomous Systems & Connectivity Division
James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow
Email: tao.zhang@glasgow.ac.uk
Dr Tao Zhang is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Flight Sciences at the Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on deriving faster, more accurate, and more automated computational methods for aerodynamics, aeroacoustics, and optimisation. His modelling capabilities support a wide range of scientific and engineering innovations, including rotary-wing and rotorcraft, flight modelling, and fire and environmental flows. His doctoral research in collaboration with the EU GARTEUR AG25 won the Dr Alan Stirling Brown Prize 2023 from the University of Glasgow. His previous modelling work on the GKN Skybus heavy-lift design won the Gareth Padfield Award 2023 from the 49th European Rotorcraft Forum.
Dr Tao Zhang serves as a committee member in several professional bodies including the Royal Aeronautical Society, the UK Vertical Lift Network, and the Vertical Flight Society UK Chapter, and the EPSRC Peer Review College. He is currently also an associate editor for the Aerospace Science and Technology journal.