Industrial Mathematics Internships create a new bridge between industry and the mathematical knowledge-base.

The KTN for Industrial Mathematics, Technology Strategy Board and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) have injected fresh energy into UK businesses by launching a programme to bring cutting edge techniques to business innovation and to develop long-term working relationships between companies and universities. As part of the Internship programme evolution, it is being brought into the Knowledge Transfer Partnership programme to establish it on a larger scale as a permanent part of the innovation landscape.

Industrial Mathematics Internships increase the amount of collaborative research in mathematics, create new routes to innovation in companies and increase employability of the Interns themselves. The Internships provide a way for companies and university research groups to develop long-term working relationships and promote direct knowledge exchange, through engaging a dedicated postgraduate researcher to work on a specific industrial project over a period of 3-6 months.

The Internship programme enables:

• industrialists to explore new horizons or improve existing operations by bringing mathematical expertise and cutting-edge techniques into their innovation activities;
• postgraduate researchers to demonstrate their knowledge and insight in addressing industrial challenges;
• academics to use Internships as a seed for growing new industrial collaborators and relationships.

The second year of the programme saw the number of projects increase from 6 to 25.

The Internships programme attracts companies of all sizes - from SMEs to multinational corporations - and benefits a wide range of industrial sectors. Companies involved include ACE Group, Airbus, ARM Ltd, Barnett-Waddington, Barrie and Hibbert, Bioinnovel, British Swimming, BT, Dstl, Frazer-Nash Consultancy, HOSDB, Lloyd’s of London, LSC Group, Met Office, NAG, National Grid, Roxar, Unilever, VR Technology and Willis Research Network.

Further details are available at www.ktn-internships.net. To find out how your organisation can benefit from this programme, contact Dr Vera Hazelwood.

"At Lloyd’s, we had previously done some work on optimal portfolio mixes and we wished to take this further and refine it more extensively. Having a 5-month intern from Brunel University via the Industrial Mathematics Internship Programme really helped us to make significant progress in this regard, making full use of her supervisor at Brunel, and recently she presented the main findings of her work to the Head of the Franchise Performance Directorate, who was very impressed. She has now subsequently been offered a role within our team to continue this good work going into the future and assist on other important modelling projects." - Michael Samuels, Lloyd’s of London

The complexity, fidelity and cost of internal ballistics models

"Our maths internship was a great success. The thing that impressed me most was how Tom, with support from the university, applied an approach which we would not have otherwise used. This resulted in a process which gives us more confidence in selection between our existing industrial modelling toolsets. Hopefully the greatest long term benefit of the internship will be closer ties between Frazer-Nash and Bristol University. Prior to the internship we had met with Bristol which generated a mutual desire to work together, but the internship provided the impetus." - Martin Pocock, Frazer-Nash Consultancy

Frazer-Nash Consultancy is one of the UK’s largest providers of systems and engineering technology. They own, develop and market the leading commercial 1D internal ballistics software. This is a computational fluid dynamics code which solves the complex ignition, burning and gas dynamics that occur during the firing stage of gun and mortar systems. Frazer-Nash Consultancy has more recently been developing a 2D version of the code.

A 6-month Internship project was carried out at Frazer-Nash Consultancy in conjunction with the University of Bristol. The focus of the project undertaken by postgraduate student Tom Melvin was assessing the relative benefits of the two internal ballistics software packages and to understand mathematically when to make decisions based on a 1D simulation alone and whether significant differences occur in the 2D simulations.

The aim of the Internship was to develop a mathematical approach to predict the relative behaviour of the codes across a range of sample problems. The successful internship has given Frazer-Nash Consultancy more confidence and experience in undertaking such mathematical treatments for future studies.

Related work is being undertaken within Frazer-Nash Consultancy as part of a collaborative fluid mechanics initiative. Part of this involves development of multi-level optimisation schemes for engineering CFD analysis applied to boat hull design and ship motion. Essentially these use two or more solution techniques of different fidelities and computational costs to reduce the solution space rapidly before more detailed refinement. The work undertaken by Tom during the Internship has influenced the applicability of multi-level optimisation to internal ballistics modelling.