Petroleum Engineering
Work for the reservoir simulation software package PVTi was performed for Schlumberger Geoquest plc and is detailed here.
Technical details:
Fortran engine delivering thermodynamic simulations for hydrocarbon products with a C++ front end to keep the worldwide clients happy (days of the C++ paradigm shift mid to late 90s). Code was written to run all systems at the time – IBM Mainframe, all unix boxes (Apollo, IBM, SG, Sun, HP), PC (Windows 3!) though not the Mac!
Nuclear Fusion
Mathematical simulations were carried out to determine heat losses in fusion plasmas due to the hydrogen/deuterium colliding with the stainless steel walls of the tokamak. A semi-classical model was used to determine the cross section for the collision between H/D atoms in the plasma and C from the walls; the calculations were carried out on a novel (for its time!) parallel computing network of transputers using a SIMD parallel approach. Such methods have since been superceded by more parallel chips, vectorisation options, grid and cloud computing. The results were compared with real data from the ongoing JET experiment.
Fusion is not dead but lives and will come to fruition eventually… see here.
Technical details:
Software code in Fortran with communication with transputers via Occam language.
Fusion Research