Aerothermal flows

Thermal coupling between structure and fluid in motion is of significant importance in many industrial engineering applications. For combustion chambers, this complex effect has a large impact on thermal stresses of combustor walls submitted to a flame front, temperature of multiperforated walls and more generally on the life cycle of the different components.

With the access to increasing computer power, numerical simulation is more and more an efficient tool to study these themes. Based on its experience on High Performance Computing, CERFACS develops an efficient aero-thermal application using the Large Eddy Simulation code AVBP that solve the reactive Navier Stokes equations and AVTP dedicated to conduction in solids. The code coupler PALM MP is used to easily integrate the solvers and make them communicate. The characteristics of the coupler are important to fastly generate new configurations as well as to use massively parallel architectures for production cases.

Predicting the vanes temperature field which are cooled from the inside by cold air is a major research area (Holmer et al. 2000; Medic; Durbin 2002; Garg 2002). Here an experimental setup (T120D blade) developed within the AITEB-1 European project was used to evaluate the precision of the coupled simulations done with AVBP and AVTP.

Contacts: Florent Duchaine