Position details

COPA-GT: Multiphysics Coupled Simulations of gas turbines
Thesis › Computational Fluid Dynamics - Combustion

Required Education / Niveau requis

Master (open to non french students only)

From / Date de début

October 2011

Duration / Durée

36 months

Context / Contexte

One path for sustainable development is the development of more efficient and ‘green’ gas turbines (GT). A GT is composed of a compressor, a combustor and a turbine, and it is driven by combustion, heat transfer, thermal behaviour of the solid parts, acoustics and noise generation and mechanical vibration. GT optimization is therefore a complex multi-physics, multi-component problem, which has long been based on engineering intuition and expensive experiments and tests. Developing numerical tools and methodologies to simulate the entire GT with all physical effects is a new challenge and the overall scientific objective of the COPA-GT Marie Curie European project, involving 8 partners from research and industry. (Turbomeca, Rolls-Royce, Siemens). Such coupled simulations represent one of the most demanding challenges for High Performance Computing (HPC).

Description / Description

The proposed thesis corresponds to WP5 of the project COPA-GT. It is devoted to the resolution of mathematical and computational problems raised by multi-physics coupling, with special effort on parallel efficiency. The student will define the mathematical problem of coupling in terms of boundary conditions and study the stability and well-posed nature of the resulting equations. He will also contribute to develop coupling softwares for efficient parallel execution of the coupled solvers. He will then apply the developed tools to an industrial gas turbine, designed by Turbomeca for helicopters. Results will be analysed to see the impact of coupled multiphysics on the gas turbine behavior in terms of combustion, acoustics, and heat transfer.

Contacts / Contacts

Name: Cuenot Bénédicte
Phone: 05 61 19 30 44
Fax: 05 61 19 30 00
Email: cuenot@cerfacs.fr