My research group focuses on the challenge of developing modern, high-performance software to solve problems in fluid mechanics, fusion, the aeronautics industry and other topics in the science and engineering fields. Our interests are highly disciplinary, lying at the intersection of computational engineering applied mathematics, and high performance computing.
Currently some of our goals focus around understanding fluid turbulence: how steady laminar flows transition to this chaotic state and how this impacts on real-world problems in the aeronautics industry. To achieve this I am developing efficient, robust and massively parallel high-order spectral element software that, together with modern computing technology, will form the next generation of computational flow simulation software.
On this website you’ll find information on what research we do, see a list of publications, seminars presented or our upcoming events, read my CV or find out a bit more about my background.
New paper in SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing 14th May 2026
Boyang Xia and David Moxey have a paper in SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing on evaluating interface fluxes in discontinuous Galerkin spectral element methods. Non-conforming interfaces are one of the real strengths of DG, but if the flux is not evaluated carefully the resulting system matrix can lose symmetry. The paper sets out low-cost, unified approaches for general element shapes on unstructured meshes, together with a matrix-free implementation in Nektar++.
Surrogate-based optimisation of a centrifugal fan 18th November 2025
Centrifugal fans are widely used in building ventilation and air-conditioning, and are under growing pressure to be more efficient and quieter at the same time. A new paper in Engineering Applications of Computational Fluid Mechanics validates CFD models for both the aerodynamics and the aeroacoustics of a backward-curved centrifugal fan, then trains surrogate models on those simulations to optimise for both objectives together.
Two mesh generation papers in Computer-Aided Design 15th September 2025
Two papers from our collaboration with Imperial College London have appeared in Computer-Aided Design. The first tackles high-order mesh generation from third-party meshes: curving and optimising an imported mesh normally needs an accurate CAD parametrisation of the boundary, which is often missing in multi-software workflows, so the paper sets out a way to reconstruct that connectivity. The second is a proof-of-concept for generating curvilinear polygonal meshes for the Virtual Element Method.
New programme grant: REMODEL 1st August 2025
We are part of REMODEL, an EPSRC Programme Grant on advancing parallel mesh generation and geometry representation to enable industrially relevant, high-fidelity simulations. It is a 60-month programme with a total project value of £7.9M, led by Swansea University, with partners at Imperial College London, Queen’s University Belfast, EPCC at the University of Edinburgh, and ourselves at King’s.
Generating a valid mesh remains one of the largest practical obstacles to running high-fidelity simulations at scale, and it is the part of the workflow that is hardest to automate. REMODEL organises its work around geometry handling, mesh generation, and the use of machine learning within both. Our contribution builds on Nektar++ and NekMesh.
Parallel-in-time simulations in Nektar++ 20th March 2025
Jacques Xing, Chris Cantwell and David Moxey have a paper in Computer Physics Communications describing the work to bring time-parallel integration methods into Nektar++. Where spatial parallelism saturates, integrating along the time axis as well offers a further route to using large HPC systems effectively.