Our Facilities
Our location on the south coast of England gives us easy access to some world leading facilities. Using state of the art, research level equipment, we deliver exceptional results for our customers.
Model Basins
Towing tanks and ocean basins used to test our model ships and offshore structures.
Wind Tunnels
The Wolfson Unit has access to a range of wind tunnels to match the flow conditions of many aerodynamic studies.
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Capabilities
CFD modelling offers faster turn around and more cost effective answers to fluid dynamics problems. We offer hydro, aero and fluid-structure interaction modelling.
Wolfson facilities
Model Basins
We conduct the majority of our model testing in model basins. Constrained towed tests are mainly completed at the Boldrewood towing tank to establish resistance curves and a vessel’s behaviour in head seas. Free running tests are conducted in the Ocean basin. Manoeuvring and behaviour in seas from all headings are tested here.
While these are our main test facilities, we are not limited to them. We have conducted tests in tanks all over the world and have even occasionally tested on open water.
Boldrewood towing tank
- 138m x 6m x 3.5m
- 10 m/s carriage speed
- 12 element wavemaker
QinetiQ Ocean basin
- 122m x 61m x 5.5m
- Qualisys Motion Capture System
- 122 element wavemaker
78m Sloop for MMYD
Wolfson facilities
Wind Tunnels
Wind tunnels are used to assess the aerodynamic performance of models. The Wolfson Unit completes tests on: sailing yachts, ships, workboats, civil projects, sports and various forms of land based transport.
We use two main wind tunnels on site, although we have used other wind tunnels in the past to meet specific project specifications.
R J Mitchell Wind Tunnel
- Working section: 3.5m wide, 2.4m high and 10.5m long.
- Wind speed range: 4 – 40m/s (less than 0.2% turbulence).
- An air chiller is used to control the airflow temperature at 19°C.
No. 1 Wind Tunnel
- The high speed section: 2.1m wide 1.5m high and 4.4m long with wind speed range of 4-45m/s.
- The low speed section: 4.6m wide and 3.7m high. This section allows for testing of sailing rigs at a larger scale.
Wolfson facilities
CFD Capabilities
The Wolfson Unit conduct most computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis using the University of Southampton’s latest supercomputer, Iridis 5. This facilitates throughput of large matrices of simulations and the ability to solve large scale problems.
Iridis 5 specifications
- 20,000 processor cores providing 1,305 TFlops peak
- currently ~2.2 PB of usable disk space
- At least 4.8GB of memory per processor core, typical jobs running on 80 processors can thus use 384GB RAM.
- Infiniband network throughout
Supercomputer access
As well as using the Iridis computational resource for undertaking our own consultancy services, we have the capability of providing a portal to the supercomputer for clients to run their own simulations.
Other facilities
Wolfson Unit staff have experience of a wide range of computer clusters, using clients’ own systems , AWS (Amazon Web Services) and national facilities such as the Hartree Centre.