Question: What is the biggest discovery you have made in your area of expertise?

Luke Humphrey answered on 22 Mar 2022: last edited 22 Mar 2022 8:47 am

I’ve only been working in science for a year and a bit, so most of my time has actually been spent learning skills and specialist knowledge for my work. A lot of my work is also developing and evaluating the computational tools required for research, not necessarily doing research myself (though sometimes these are done together).

One project I completed last year involved simulating a device called “hypervapotron” (basically a very fancy water pipe with millimeter-thick fins inside which extracts heat from a fusion reactor). I simulated it at a higher level of detail than had been done before, which revealed some interesting patterns in the water flow and boiling processes. Previous work on the tool had been experimental, just testing designs for performance without needing to understand what made a given design work. With recent advances in computing power, though, now we are able to go back to the design and simulate it, and try out little changes to the design virtually (much faster and cheaper than testing physical prototypes). So, I made a start on doing that!