Mark Sterling

Manchester Metropolitan University | MMU · Faculty of Science and Engineering

For the first time, this paper examines the aerodynamic forces that arise in a platoon of Heavy Goods Vehicle lorries travelling in close proximity during an overtaking manoeuvre. Through an in-depth programme of wind tunnel experiments it is demonstrated that there is a complex relationship between the drag and side force coefficients, with a poss...

Forest preservation and management are paramount for sustainable mitigation of climate change, timber production, and the economy. However, the potential of trees and forests to provide these benefits to the ecosystem is hampered by natural phenomena such as windthrow and anthropogenic activities. The aim of the current research was to undertake a...

Alongside traditional teaching-and-research pathways, a number of universities have implemented new pathways, which have an education focus (but are different from teaching-only contracts) or which place emphasis on professional practice, enterprise, public engagement, and/or knowledge exchange (labelled practice/entrepreneurship in short in the vo...

This paper examines whether crop fall patterns due to thunderstorm downburst-like events can provide an insight into the flow structure of a downburst. To explore this phenomenon, a novel three-dimensional analytical model for the velocity flow field is derived and coupled with a generalised plant model which is capable of modelling crop failure. T...

Redesigned academic career frameworks are intended to benefit an institution overall, through resourcing academics to use their strengths in support of a university’s strategic priorities. This chapter highlights various benefits from the institutional perspective and addresses broader questions and challenges around career framework redesign and i...

The pace of change of academic career frameworks varies within and across national higher education systems. Trailblazing institutions have introduced frameworks that speak to their core ethos and mission, and support academics to use a broad range of expertise for the benefit of students and wider communities. Other institutions are at different s...

Learning and personal and professional growth are at the core of what universities do, whether for students, academics, or other internal and external stakeholders. Redesigned academic career frameworks support this, either through distinct pathway tracks or through recognition of the need to flexibly combine and reward a broad enough range of acad...

The redesign of academic career frameworks aims to respond to the increased complexity of academic roles. The nature of the academic role is discussed in this chapter, with reference to the substantive activities that make up a role as well as to career stages. Discussion about academic identities follows. Roles and identities overlap partly; both...

Carefully redesigned academic career frameworks benefit academic staff with a diverse range of professional profiles, life circumstances, and scholarly interests. This chapter lays out benefits for individual academics, as well as for students and other internal and external stakeholders. Discussion of job crafting as a means to achieve pathway fit...

Technological developments in Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have created opportunities to allow groups of vehicles to travel in close proximity, through methods known as platooning. There are potential benefits from platooning in terms of fuel consumption, through a reduction in aerodynamic drag for trailing vehicles in the platoon; howev...

This paper investigates the effects of tornado translation on pressure and overall force experienced by an airfoil subjected to tornado loading and presents a framework to reproduce the flow conditions and effects of a moving tornado. A thin symmetrical airfoil was used to explore the effects of tornado translation on a body. A panel method was use...

Proper understanding of rainfall variability is of essential importance for meteorological and hydrological modelling. This study examines whether a variety of nonlinear dynamic concepts can yield additional insights in the rainfall variability in the UK. Daily rainfall data recorded over a 30-yr period (1989-2018) from 32 meteorological stations a...

Lodging is a major constraint to increasing the global productivity of maize (Zea Maize L.). The objectives of this paper are to: i) describe a model for stem and root lodging in maize, ii) calibrate the anchorage strength component of the model, iii) evaluate the model’s applicability by assessing its capacity to explain effects of crop husbandry...

This paper presents the numerical study on the flight behaviour of spherical compact debris in a tornado-like wind field. The tornado-like vortex corresponding to a swirl ratio of 0.7 was generated using Large-eddy Simulation and the trajectories of 2250 individual debris particles placed in the flow were computed using Lagrangian-particle tracking...

This paper examines compact debris flight in tornado-like flow fields. The research focuses on physically simulating a specific tornado-like vortex and on investigating windborne debris flight with and without a low-rise building model. The low-rise building model, 1/8th scale with regard to the vortex core radius, was used to initiate the flight o...

For the first time, this research enables a systematic parametric analysis of oat lodging to be undertaken. A generalised lodging model combining agronomy, biology and wind engineering has been used. Standard husbandry treatments have been deployed in order to ensure that the oat plants are grown in realistic conditions and to ensure that the resul...

Urban winds can cause a risk to pedestrian safety if not properly assessed. High-rise buildings produce a complex flow field at ground level, where regions of accelerated and recirculating flows are present. Gust wind speeds provide an indication of the maximal speed pedestrian might experience due to the unsteady flow. In this study, low- and high...

It is well known that tornadoes passing over fields can cause significant damage to crops, and tornado tracks of fallen, or lodged, crops can extend for many hundreds of metres. An examination of photographic evidence of such events suggests that, at least for low speed EF0 / EF1 events, lodging occurs beneath tornadoes primarily due to a strong ra...

This paper considers a process through which the wind costs the agricultural industry hundreds of millions of pounds per year-crop lodging. Lodging is the displacement of crops by wind (and rain) that can result in either stem breakage or uprooting. In particular this paper builds upon recent work to develop a generalised model of the lodging proce...

This paper examines the impact that climate change may have on the lodging of oats in the Republic of Ireland and the UK. Through the consideration of a novel lodging model representing the motion of an oat plant due to the interaction of wind and rain and integrating future predictions of wind and rainfall due to climate change, appropriate conclu...

Within the wind engineering community, a series of physical simulators of differing geometries have been used to investigate the flow-field of tornado-like vortices. This paper examines the influence that the geometry of a simulator can have on the generated flow field. Surface pressure and velocity data have been measured for two swirl ratios (S =...

The book includes a discussion of the experimental, numerical and analytical tools that are available for train aerodynamics. A wide range of aerodynamic issues that need to be taken into account in the design of new trains and new railway routes. This is a reference work for railway engineers, train operators and manufacturers, infrastructure mana...

In recent years, the concept of autonomous road vehicles has gained a great deal of technical respectability, with expected fuel benefits arising from running vehicles closely in platoons. However, the aerodynamics of such vehicles travelling in close proximity is still not understood. This paper presents for the first time a detailed study of drag...

This paper examines compact debris flight in tornado-like flow fields. The research focuses on simulating a specific tornado-like vortex using the University of Birmingham Tornado-like Vortex Generator (UoB-TVG) and on investigating windborne debris flight with and without a low-rise building model. The low-rise building model, 1/8 th scale with re...

This paper describes how wind engineering, geospatial science and crop agronomy disciplines can be combined to provide a decision support system for farmers to manage lodging risk, using the Crop Failure Assessment due to Lodging Losses (CROPFALL) framework. CROPFALL calculates lodging risk using information about topography, land cover, soil type...

In recent years a number of Tornado Vortex Generators (TVGs) have been constructed and tested, with a view to providing facilities that can be used to determine wind loads on a variety of structures in tornado conditions. The scaling of TVGs has however proved to be contentious and different authors have taken different approaches. In this paper we...

There has been much debate of late regarding the physical simulation of downbursts and, in particular, the need to construct large-scale, relatively expensive facilities in order to obtain wind loading data. For the first time, this paper illustrates that, through the use of partial turbulence simulations and quasi-steady analysis, it is possible t...

This paper presents a novel methodology for calculating the risk of a train overturning accident due to tornadoes. It applies a recently developed model of tornado wind fields to the complex case of a moving vehicle passing at different distances from the centre of a moving tornado. The wind speed and direction relative to the vehicle can thus be c...

This paper presents a novel conceptual design framework which takes into account the direct wind loads and pressure loads acting on a structure due to the passing of a tornado. Furthermore, for the first time, the potential damage due to debris impact has been incorporated enabling a holistic assessment of structural loading to be considered. The m...

In this paper a major series of experiments is described that included extensive full-scale measurements of cross wind induced pressures on the Class 43 New Measurement Train over an extended 21 month period, together with wind tunnel, moving model tests and CFD calculations, and allows, for the first time, a proper evaluation of the adequacy of th...

High winds and rainfall can cause crop lodging, the permanent displacement of plant stems from their vertical position either as root lodging, where the plant root system fails, or as stem lodging, where the stem fails at some point above the ground. Lodging can cause major losses in yield for a wide range of cereal crops, and can significantly red...

Given the difficulties associated with undertaking full-scale measurements in tornadoes, recourse is often made to models. In this field, analytical models have, perhaps surprisingly, stood the test of time, with the Rankine, Burgers-Rott and Sullivan models frequently invoked to model the flow field of a tornado. These mathematical models are by t...

Thunderstorm downbursts are short-lived, transient extreme wind events which can cause wind speeds equivalent to a category EF3 tornado (∼150mph). The complex flow field which they produce has previously been the subject of time-expensive numerical modelling. However, it is well-known that there is a large, random variation in full-scale downbursts...

This paper describes the derivation of a simple yet realistic engineering model of tornado wind and pressure fields. This novel model is shown to be capable of providing a method for predicting wind speed and pressure time histories and debris impact energies that can ultimately be used in the development of a rational risk-based design methodology...

A physical tornado-like vortex generator is used to investigate the behaviour of non-stationary processes in tornado-like vortices. For this purpose, three different simulations have been undertaken, during which the swirl ratio, S, (i.e., the amount of rotational energy in the flow) has varied. These experiments have illustrated that significant v...

Surface pressure and velocity flow field data have been measured in a tornado simulator for a constant aspect ratio and for two different swirl ratios. An investigation has been undertaken in order to establish what, if any, effect the convection chamber height has on the results. The tentative results suggest that the height of the convection cham...

Verified static and dynamic models of an operational works were used alongside Monte-Carlo conditions and non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NGSAII) to optimise operational regimes. Static models were found to be more suitable for whole water treatment works optimisation modelling and offered the additional advantage of reduced computation...

The relative accuracy of static and dynamic water treatment works (WTWs) models was examined. Case study data from an operational works were used to calibrate and verify these models. It was found that dynamic clarification, filtration and disinfection models were more accurate than static models at predicting the final water quality of an operatio...

Surface pressure and velocity flow field characteristics have been measured in two tornado simulators of different size, with a constant aspect ratio (a=2) corresponding to three different swirl ratios (S=0.14, S=0.30 and S=0.69). The swirl ratio’s influence on the size of the vortex core, the pressure distribution and the flow field is noted. Resu...

Surface pressure and velocity flow field characteristics have been measured in two tornado simulators of different size, with a constant aspect ratio (a=2) corresponding to three different swirl ratios (S=0.14, S=0.30 and S=0.69). The swirl ratio’s influence on the size of the vortex core, the pressure distribution and the flow field is noted. Resu...

Flumes with either width contractions or raised beds to force modular flow conditions (i.e. a transition from sub- to super-critical flow) are a widely used instrument for the measurement of flow rate. The conservation of mass, written as the continuity equation, and the conservation of energy are combined with the existence of a critical depth poi...

Relative crosswinds when coupled with transient aerodynamic effects associated with freight trains can have large velocity magnitudes, potentially affecting the stability of not only the train but also containers loaded onto the train. This paper describes a series of moving model crosswind experiments conducted at the University of Birmingham's TR...

For the first time, an extensive numerical study of the effect of crosswinds on the flow around a cyclist on a bicycle with stationary wheels has been undertaken for crosswind (yaw) angles ranging from 0° to 90°. The flow field and the aerodynamic forces have been obtained using three numerical techniques: Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS), De...

Transient winds, such as thunderstorm downbursts, are the cause of design-load wind speeds in many countries. An understanding of the loading experienced by buildings during a downburst is therefore important to allow well designed and engineered buildings to be constructed. In contrast to boundary layer winds, the maximum wind speed in thunderstor...

This paper describes novel software developments designed to automate the parsing, filtering (despiking) and calculation of mean flow and turbulence parameters of velocity time-series. The software was written to facilitate the processing of the large number of time-series (approximately 4000) generated by the authors’ experimental work, mapping ve...

To reduce air resistance, time trial cyclists and triathletes lower their torso angle. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of lowering time trial torso angle positions on muscle activation patterns and crank torque coordination. It was hypothesized that small torso angles yield a forward shift of the muscle activation timing and cra...

Thunderstorm downbursts are transient, small-scale events which are, however, the cause of design wind speeds in many parts of the world. The difficulties in predicting when and where such events will occur make capturing full-scale wind loading data for buildings particularly difficult, and so attention has turned to physically simulating downburs...

This paper explores the results obtained from an innovative physical model study which examined wind induced forces and pressures on a 1:25 scale model of a Class 390 Pendolino at a 30° yaw angle. For the first time, the work considers in detail the differences between moving model experiments and static experiments. Differences between the static...

Having been identified as the cause of design load winds in many parts of the world, transient winds such as gust fronts and thunderstorm downbursts have been increasingly researched over recent years. The difficulties in simulating the flow structure of downbursts in the laboratory, particularly their rapid radial acceleration and associated ring...

Abstract To reduce aerodynamic resistance cyclists lower their torso angle, concurrently reducing Peak Power Output (PPO). However, realistic torso angle changes in the range used by time trial cyclists have not yet been examined. Therefore the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of torso angle on physiological parameters and frontal ar...

Crosswinds have the potential to influence the stability and therefore the safety of a motorbike rider. Numerical computations using both delayed detached-eddy simulations (DDES) and Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) were employed to investigate the flow around a motorbike subjected to crosswinds with yaw angles of 15, 30, 60 and 90 degrees. T...

The aims of this research were to firstly investigate the effect of crosswinds on the aerodynamic behaviour of cyclists and secondly, to determine which parameters (cyclist position and bike type) influenced the aerodynamic forces on cyclists the most. The aerodynamic response of two different full-scale bikes with and without a mannequin has been...

Increases in the volume of trade within the UK rail freight industry have led to proposed increases in freight train speeds. There is a concern that the unsteady slipstream created around a moving freight train could have implications on efficiency and the safety of passengers waiting on platforms or trackside workers. This paper describes a series...

Traditionally, open channels have tended to be modelled assuming a difference in roughness between the bed and the walls of the channel. Whilst this is a reasonable starting point, the reality is much more complex with heterogeneous roughness elements (or roughness 'patches') regularly occurring on the bed of the channel. Given that the bed acts as...

The lodging of cereal crops due to high wind and rain is of considerable significance in many parts of the world, leading to major economic losses and yield reductions. In earlier papers the authors have developed a model of the lodging of winter wheat that identified the major parameters of the problem and enabled the relationship between root and...

The aerodynamic drag of a cyclist in time trial (TT) position is strongly influenced by the torso angle. While decreasing the torso angle reduces the drag, it limits the physiological functioning of the cyclist. Therefore the aims of this study were to predict the optimal TT cycling position as function of the cycling speed and to determine at whic...

The experimental investigation of turbulence has been greatly aided by the development of instruments capable of measuring and recording instantaneous velocity measurements at high frequencies, such as Laser Doppler and Acoustic Doppler Velocimeters. As a consequence of the techniques and algorithms used by some of these instruments, the introducti...

Physical and numerical simulations of open channel flow over a heterogeneously roughened bed are examined. The velocity field is mapped at four different cross sections by using an acoustic Doppler velocimeter and the boundary shear stress obtained from both the velocity data and application of a Preston tube. These data illustrate that in the curr...

This paper describes software developments designed to automate the parsing, filtering (despiking) and calculation of mean flow and turbulence parameters of velocity time-series. The software was written to facilitate the processing of the large number of time-series (approximately 4000) generated by the authors' experimental work, mapping velocity...

This paper examines the velocity field in an idealised heterogeneous open channel during normal flow conditions, corresponding to two different subcritical flow conditions (discharges of 0.040 m3/s and 0.056 m3/s, with correspond-ing Froude numbers 0.51 and 0.57). The bed of the channel is formed of two full-length, longitudinal strips of equal wid...

This study will investigate the interference effects between two model high rise CAARC buildings at a scale of 1:1000 in non-synoptic outflow. The University of Birmingham non-synoptic effects simulator will be used as well as a numerical model designed to simulate the simulator. The two building's yaw angle will be altered around a central axis to...

This paper applies a genetic algorithm to static and dynamic models of a case study water treatment works to find near optimal designs. The mechanisms of these models, their calibration and accuracy are described. The models were used with stochastic data representative of conditions observed at the works and the NSGAII genetic algorithm was applie...

Slipstreams associated with freight trains can have large pressure and velocity magnitudes, potentially creating a danger to the public on platforms and trackside workers. Open air moving model aerodynamic experiments were undertaken using a 1/25th scale container freight train at the TRAIN rig facility to develop an understanding and characterise...

This paper will examine two numerical approaches to simulating the University of Birmingham non-synoptic winds simulator. Both simulations have used URANS and either DES or LES to simulate the simulator. The first case considers a simple domain that for the DES case uses an inlet condition which bases its turbulence generation on the value of turbu...

This is the first part of a two-part paper that describes the results of an experimental investigation to measure the aerodynamic pressure forces on structures in the vicinity of railway tracks. The investigations were carried out in order to obtain a fundamental understanding of the nature of the phenomenon and to obtain data for a variety of rail...

Traditionally, a quasi steady response concerning the aerodynamic force and moment coefficients acting on a flat plate while 'flying' through the air has been assumed. Such an assumption has enabled the flight paths of windborne debris to be predicted and an indication of its potential damage to be inferred. In order to investigate this assumption...