David Eckold Email & Phone Number

Oxford, Gb

Knowledge Exchange FellowFor the past c. 6 years I have been working as a KEF on the AcceleratingThermal Energy Technology Adoption (ATETA) project. ATETA is a small tomedium-sized enterprise (SME) engagement programme to help local businessesidentify opportunities for clean energy innovation, funded by the EuropeanRegional Development Fund (ERDF). In this role, I acted as a consultant toprovide support for local businesses, and performed… Show more Knowledge Exchange FellowFor the past c. 6 years I have been working as a KEF on the AcceleratingThermal Energy Technology Adoption (ATETA) project. ATETA is a small tomedium-sized enterprise (SME) engagement programme to help local businessesidentify opportunities for clean energy innovation, funded by the EuropeanRegional Development Fund (ERDF). In this role, I acted as a consultant toprovide support for local businesses, and performed research.ConsultingIn this role, it was my responsibility to deliver short term consulting workfor local SMEs. I was required to perform a wide variety of projects,including: lab based testing, data analysis, finite-element method (FEM)simulations, computer-aided design (CAD), calculations, and literaturereviews. The outputs of these consultations was typically a PDF report andpresentation. During this role, I regularly used Python or Julia for dataanalysis or optimisation problems.ResearchIn addition to the consultation work for SMEs, I undertook research work incollaboration with Victrex plc. to develop an FEM model of frictional heatingof polymer gears. For this work I wrote tooling in the Julia programminglanguage to generate unstructured meshes of involute gears based on generalgear parameters (e.g. gear module, pressure angle, etc.), define boundaryconditions, and control and run simulation software to solve a given model.The tooling could dynamically generate the mesh and simulation parameters, toenable the exploration of how the geometry and running conditions would affectthe thermal losses. In addition to the Julia tooling, this work also requiredthe use of Fortran90 to write boundary condition subroutines and patch the FEMsolver source code to implement missing physics. Show less