End of the Sun

So it's been a glorious week here in the UK, and the weather has decided that it's about time to rain on that parade (quite literally). Cold and miserable! I need to go to the shops but I'm inside with a cup of tea instead.

The conference last week went well - mainly catalysis which is not really my area. (well, not at all) The talks were interesting and I met some people who gave me a good idea of how to focus my work a little more. To top it all off, when travelling to the conference we inadvertently met James May (of Top Gear fame) at Loughborough University when we got lost! Some excellent detective work from the other Chemical Engineers has shown that they were most likely filming an episode of something, and probably not Top Gear itself. He's going a bit grey now, it must be said.

Computing is as interesting as ever. I've tried to give myself a tiny push in the direction of time management by "allowing" myself to read in the morning and work after lunch; at the moment I'm getting through the book "Computational Fluid Dynamics: the Finite Volume Method" by the wonderfully-named W. Malalasekra. Very good book, pitched at this level as an introduction. I'm almost through it; once I am I will shuffle onto the 2-phase stuff which will be more relevant with my work. I want to go through the Blazek text on CFD as well but it looks like I want to read hundreds of books and I don't have hundreds of hours.

I'm just going through the code at the moment, getting used to how algorithms are implemented and trying to unravel the mysterious MPI commands. I'd like to get some simulations running but it's not that simple unfortunately - firstly the code itself is for a compressible gas so I need to do some alterations to get it going for an (incompressible) liquid and secondly the old geometry doesn't read into the new one. I need to go and re-draw and re-mesh the geometry, but the mesh conversion program doesn't work from GAMBIT files (which is what I use). It works from ICEM-CFD, but that doesn't work on my PC at the moment because of the licencing server going bottoms-up each time.

Pretty apt for a PhD really - what should be a fairly linear process ends up horribly truncated and dendritic. I suppose that's why time management just goes out of the window!