CENTAUR is being used routinely to create meshes for LES cases involving complex geometries. The ability to create large, high quality meshes is key to successful LES applications. CENTAUR also allows for the explicit control of the minimum scales. Parallel mesh generation allows for the large meshes needed for LES to be generated in a reasonable time. Some examples of LES simulations performed using CENTAUR grids are shown below.

All images are courtesy of CERFACS.

A mesh containing 336 million tetrahedra was used to simulate the combustion instabilities present in the annular combustion chamber of a helicopter engine. The image shows the flame colored by the velocity magnitude.

Reference: P. Wolf, G. Staffelbach, R. Balakrishnan, A. Roux, and T. Poinsot. Azimuthal instabilities in annular combustion chambers. In Proceedings of the Summer Program, Center for Turbulence Research, NASA AMES, Stanford University, USA, 2010.

This research used resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at Argonne National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357.

This image represents the flame propagation during ignition in the annular combustion chamber of a helicopter engine with 18 burners. It is a two phase flow Large Eddy Simulation performed on 2048 cores.

Reference: M. Boileau, G. Staffelbach, B. Cuenot, T. Poinsot, and C. Bérat. LES of an ignition sequence in a gas turbine engine. Combustion and Flame, 154(1-2):2-22, 2008.

Large Eddy Simulation of the reactive flow in a twin-inlet ramjet configuration to study combustion instabilities and flow characteristics.

Reference: A. Roux, L.Y.M. Gicquel, S. Reichstadt, N. Bertier, G. Staffelbach, F. Vuillot and T. Poinsot. Analysis of unsteady reacting flows and impact of chemistry description in large eddy simulations of side-dumps ramjet combustors. Combustion and Flame 157 (1):176-191, 2010.