The increase of computer power has allowed science to make important strides in a variety of domains such as plasma studies, biomechanics, and molecular dynamics. With access to the INCITE program, researchers from CERFACS (the European Centre for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computation) have been able to perform top-of-the-line quality simulations on highly complex cases in their goal towards the fully numerical modeling of a real combustor.

This research is focused on Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of gas turbine engines with the inclusion of liquid phase phenomena. CERFACS has performed simulations and validation of two-phase flow experiments. In parallel, taking advantage of the leadership-class computer available at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, the researchers have performed the largest unstructured LES done to date of a real, full combustion chamber (330 million elements) on more than 16K cores. This simulation contributes to the validation of the LES approach when dealing with combustion instabilities. In these cases, the effects of mesh refinement are a highly critical point that was validated during the Stanford Center for Turbulence Research (CTR) summer program. A second mesh independency validation was performed, but this time it used a simpler, two-phase-flow single burner with three levels of refinement (4-, 8-, and 16-million elements). These results were published in the CTR Proceedings of the 2010 Summer Program by Cambridge University Press. Evaluation of the unbalance observed in Lagrangian simulations remains to be performed.