Research engineer - Development of computational methods for high-speed reacting flows (RE1/RE2) per al Barcelona Supercomputing Center

The future of the aerial transportation industry relies on developing new technologies which are more environmentally friendly. Among other concepts, supersonic devices operating with hydrogen fuel offer an attractive alternative to conventional airplanes. The use of hydrogen directly mitigates emissions of CO (pollutant) and CO2 (greenhouse warming gas), while hypersonic flight for commercial transport will considerably reduce the travelling time among destinations. Nevertheless, combustion at hypersonic regimes, found in propulsion concepts such as scramjets, is still on its early developments, and a better understanding is needed so that technology can be developed and used in commercial applications. Experimental tests are of limited use for research and technology transfer, since the use of diagnostics in high-speed combustion find several limitations, hence not providing all the necessary data for its study. In this sense, the use of numerical simulations of reactive flows, in particular with Large Eddy Simulations (LES), present an attractive alternative for accessing all kinds of non-stationary data. Nevertheless, the application of LES methodologies to hypersonic problems requires a careful treatment of the Navier-Stokes equations from a numerical perspective, as needs also a proper integration of combustion models to study reactive applications.

The objective of this project is to develop a numerical methodology for compressible flow simulations in LES. The methodology, to be integrated in the in-house solver Alya, will be coupled to tabulated chemistry using the Flamelet Progress Variable (FPV) approach for modelling combustion. The solver will be validated with canonical problems relevant to supersonic combustion, and will be applied to high-speed reactive mixing layers of hydrogen and air, which are relevant to scramjet configurations.

The research team that the applicant will be involved is the Propulsion Technologies Group at CASE Department of BSC. The team is a multidisciplinary group with researchers from all disciplines and with strong background in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The team is involved in many EU and industrial projects related to this topic, where the successful activities and the publications on highly ranked scientific journals give the proved expertise.

Key Duties

• Collaborate with the different partners of the projects to carry our collaborative research.
• Contribute to scientific publications and reporting to different National and EU projects the researcher will be involved in.
• The offered position is a research engineer vacancy to implement a new LES methodology for reactive compressible applications relevant to the aerospace industry. A mathematical formulation will be developed to solve the Navier-Stokes equations applied to compressible flows. In particular, the focus will be on the reactive flow equations to solve combustion problems, such as hydrogen combustion. The solver will be integrated into the in-house, Multiphysics code Alya. Once developed, it will be used to study supersonic combustion systems for ramjets and scramjets.
• Focus will be on the reactive flow equations to solve combustion problems, such as hydrogen combustion.
• The solver will be integrated into the in-house, multiphysics code Alya. Once developed, it will be used to study both canonical problems, such as high-speed shear layers, and industrial configurations, such as supersonic combustion in scramjets.

Data de tancament: Divendres, 31 Gener, 2025

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