Hampshire Ambassadors Visit Local Academic Institution

The Hampshire Ambassadors is a group of institutions, businesses and industrial organisations in the County of Hampshire, UK, which periodically visit sites of interest in the region. Ashurst Lodge was selected as the place for one of several visits because of its unique range of advanced activities. The idea is to bring them to the attention of local business in order to achieve better interaction with them.

The visitors were welcomed by Carlos Brebbia as Director of WIT and Chairman of the companies operating from the Lodge. He explained that the main function of the Group is to act as a Centre for the transfer of advanced technology between academia and industry. This is achieved through a wide range of activities, such as conferences, courses and seminars, PhD and Mphil programmes, as well as the work of the software company, BEASY, and the publishing arm represented by WIT Press.

Bob Adey, Managing Director of BEASY, gave an idea of the range of applications of the industrial codes developed by BEASY. He particularly emphasised the high cost of failure and the importance of designing safe components using, as an illustration, several examples analysed at the Lodge. The essence of good research is to anticipate the problem and in the case of computational solutions, to optimise the high cost of physical testing. Bob demonstrated these concepts with a series of interesting applications.

Viktor Popov, Head of the Environmental and Fluid Mechanics Division, referred to the importance of pollution studies in the case of air, water, soil, food etc and also for new sources of pollution, such as acoustics and electromagnetics. Computer models developed at the Lodge have a direct application to studying these problems and hence improving quality of life. Viktor illustrated these applications for the area of groundwater contamination and the prediction of how the contaminants disperse in the long as well as the short term. Viktor is in charge of an important EU Project dealing with the risk of chemical pollution of the soil and aquifer resulting from the use of abandoned mines for storing hazardous materials.

Lance Sucharov, the Publishing Director, ended the presentations with a talk on the type of books produced at the Lodge, which now reaches 50 titles per year. He also referred to the impact that E.Publishing has on classical activities and the need to keep up with the new developments.

Carlos closed the meeting by thanking all the participants for coming to visit us and saying that he hoped this would lead to a better understanding of the Lodge's activities within our region and more collaboration with local institutions and businesses.