Nanoparticle modelling offers more precise ways of monitoring air pollution

Tiny particles found in exhaust fumes, wildfire smoke and other forms of airborne pollution are linked with stroke, heart disease and cancer, but predicting how they move is challenging.

Better understanding the behaviour of these particles – which are small enough to bypass the body’s natural defences – could lead to more precise ways of monitoring air pollution.

Using the UK’s national supercomputer ARCHER2, researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Warwick have created a method that allows a key factor governing how particles travel – the drag force – to be calculated up to 4,000 times faster than existing techniques.

The EPSRC-supported study is detailed in the Journal of Computational Physics.

In a statement, lead author Dr Giorgos Tatsios, of Edinburgh University’s School of Engineering, said: “Airborne particles in the nanoscale range are some of the most harmful to human health – but also the hardest to model. Our method allows us to simulate their behaviour in complex flows far more efficiently, which is crucial for understanding where they go and how to mitigate their effects.”