The Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer has honored a group of researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory for working with industry to use supercomputers to conduct engine simulations.

The Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer singled out a group of researchers who transferred to private industry a two-part technology for simulating the complex inner workings of internal combustion engines. One part of the technology consisted of a fuel spray model that analyzes the behavior of fuels within an engine. The second part involved load-balancing algorithm software that helps manage the high-performance computing resources necessary for the work.

This type of modeling and simulation forms the core of Argonne’s Virtual Engine Research Institute and Fuels Initiative (VERIFI), which continues to cooperate with industry to create tools that will enable cleaner, more efficient engines. This work also helped build the bridge between the use of cluster computing in the Laboratory Computing Resource Center and the massively parallel computing resources at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.

The research was led by Sibendu Som, principal mechanical engineer, and Raymond Bair, senior computational scientist. Terry Maynard, technology manager, facilitated the transfer of the technology to industry.

More information on the award is available online.