Project staff and support

Tom Melvin (Intern, University of Bristol)
Martin Pocock (Company supervisor, Frazer Nash Consultancy)
Alan Champneys (Academic mentor, University of Bristol)
David Allwright (Technology Translator, Industrial Mathematics KTN)

This 5-month Internship project was carried out at Frazer Nash Consultancy in conjunction with the University of Bristol. It is part of the KTN’s Industrial Mathematics Internships programme, co-funded by EPSRC.

Project summary

Frazer Nash is one of the UK’s biggest providers of systems and engineering technology, with over 330 permanent employees at seven UK sites. They provide independent advice to their customers in the defence, nuclear, power & energy, civil aerospace, rail, marine, petrochemical and industrial sectors.

Frazer-Nash owns, develops and markets the leading commercial 1D internal ballistics software – FNGUN. 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. Recently, Frazer-Nash has been working with QinetiQ to develop a 2D version of FNGUN; the beta-version is now available.

The focus of the Internship project undertaken by Tom Melvin was assessing the relative benefits of the two internal ballistics software packages, namely FNGUN1D and FNGUN2D, and to understand mathematically when to make decisions based on a 1D simulation alone, whether the results are reliable and whether significant differences occur in the 2D simulations. As part of the internship a conference paper was generated.

“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,” said Martin Pocock, company supervisor at Frazer Nash Consultancy.