Theoretical and numerical combustion

Spray simulation – Author(s): F. Jaegle – Credit: CERFACS

Theoretical and numerical combustion is a central field at CERFACS. With highly precise unsteady simulations, the CFD team replicates combustion in numerous systems going from academic experiments in laboratories’ flames to motors of helicopters, rockets, planes, cars, also including accidental explosions in buildings or chemical reactions in the refining field.

High-fidelity simulations

The first objective of the combustion team at CERFACS, is to keep the highest possible precision in terms of turbulence description or chemical kinetics, which are the most critical elements of a combustion simulation code.

This leads to large size codes using mesh with billions of points as well as simulations which need the biggest current operating computers (hundreds of thousands of cores).

The Cerfacs codes as a world reference

The CERFACS codes in combustion (the most famous being AVBP) are the world reference in the field and are used in numerous laboratories (e.g. IMFT in Toulouse, EM2C in Paris, CORIA in Rouen, TU in Munich, IFP Energies Nouvelles in both Rueil-Malmaison and in Solaire, ETH in Zurich, Institut von Karman in Belgium, etc.). AVBP is particularly efficient for compressible reacting flows. Today, it is associated with another code (YALES2) that Coria (Rouen) developed for the low Mach flows. These two codes are also used by several manufacturers (SNECMA Villaroche, SNECMA Vernon, SAFRAN Tech, Turbomeca, Ansaldo, Renault, PSA, Herakles, AREVA) which makes the AVBP/YALES2 community the biggest combustion team in the world.