Latest Project Updates

News about C4CW from the Tsinghua team (Jan 2012)



On the C4CW project, we have some exciting results. So exciting that we're
still trying to figure out what they mean. Basically, it seems that the
flow of water through very short nanotubes, at low flow rates below 5m/s
does not behave in the same way as at higher speeds. Instead of a
monotonic increase of flow rate with shear stress, we observe a
complicated non-linear behaviour. Figuring out what that behaviour is due
to means that we have been simulating with different dimensions of tube.
We hope to be able to say something more definite about this soon,
hopefully by April when we'll have been able to simulate a few more cases.
But for the moment it's a work in progress.

It's a bit like when astronomers got telescopes. Suddenly we're able to
look in much more detail at things we could only study on quite a coarse
scale before. So we're discovering surprising results, and need to make
sure we are not fooling ourselves with some sort of numerical effect.
What's for sure, is that the huge amount of computing power that the
volunteers are providing us with is enabling us to study a completely new
regime of water flow, which is much closer to the real conditions in water
filters. So many thanks to the volunteers and to IBM's World Community
Grid for making this possible.

Happy Chinese New Year to Everyone from the Tsinghua C4CW team!