The design of propulsion systems for aircraft, helicopters, rockets and satellites relies heavily on simulation, especially for the reacting flows taking place in combustion chambers. These simulations are a very active field of applications for CERFACS.
Turbulent reacting flows are a fascinating field for fundamental research but also a domain where industry relies heavily on simulation and views it as a key to competitivity. These problems have been the focus of CERFACS research for more than twenty years through collaborations with industry (SAFRAN, AIRBUS, HONEYWELL) and thanks to resarch contracts by ANR and the European Union (including two ERC advanced grants (intecocis.inp-toulouse.fr and cerfacs/fr/scirocco). These massive computations are performed on most existing platforms worldwide including ASCI, INCITE or PRACE projects. They constitute excellent benchmarks for the HPC tools of CERFACS.
The LES (Large Eddy Simulation) code of CERFACS is called AVBP and it is used daily at SAFRAN AIRCRAFT ENGINES and SAFRAN HELICOPTER ENGINES to design chambers. It is also used for LES in compressors and turbines and even for fully coupled simulations as shown below.
The AVBP LES tool code of CERFACS is also used for DNS (Direct Numerical Simulation). AVBP is used for example, for rocket propulsion like in the picture below showing a DNS of the stabilisation of a H2/O2 flame in the Vulcain engine at the lips of the cryogenic injector.
The chemical schemes used in AVBP can describe complex chemical kinetics: they are obtained from a systematic reduction method of full schemes with hundreds of species and reactions using a code called ARCANE developed by the CERFACS team in collaboration with Cornell (Pr Pepiot).
