Advanced High-Order Simulation Methods for Industrial Applications

Project Information

ASIMIA

Grant agreement ID: 813605

DOI

10.3030/813605

Project closed

EC signature date 22 November 2018

Start date 1 January 2019

End date 31 December 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 1 268 062,20

EU contribution

€ 1 268 062,20

Coordinated by

CADENCE DESIGN SYSTEMS BELGIUM
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ASIMIA (Advanced High-Order Simulation Methods for Industrial Applications)

Reporting period: 2021-01-01 to 2022-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

ASIMIA responds to the industrial requirements of “more simulation, less testing”, that manifests the need of numerical Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools offering advanced accuracy, reliability with capabilities for increased geometrical and physical complexity.
ASIMIA's beneficiaries, NUMECA and UPM-CCS together with five ESRs, have enhancing High Order Methods (HOM) at industrial level to cope with complex physics. HOM are based on the introduction of high degree polynomials inside each computational mesh element to improve the approximation of the numerical solution. By doing so, the accuracy (i.e. difference between numerical and real solution) is significantly improved and the numerical error decreases when increasing the polynomial order.

ASIMIA has developed enhanced turbulent models using efficient accelerations (e.g. multigrid, adaptive refinements) and parallelization for HOM. In addition, ASIMIA has extended HOM to multidisciplinary applications coupling complex turbulent flows, multiphase, heat transfer and fluid-structure interactions with moving geometries. By developing a new generation of CFD solvers based on HOM, ASIMIA has enhanced transectorial transfer of knowledge through its partner organizations from aeronautical (Airbus), automotive (McLaren F1) and appliance industries (Dyson). ASIMIA has allowed significant transfer of knowledge from the academic partner UPM-CCS to Numeca/Cadence as industrial software developer. ESRs have learnt about, and contributed to, the transfer of numerical methodologies from academic research codes to industrial software systems.

The most prominent achievements for exploitation of results are related to the development of a new generation of HOM algorithms for CFD simulation with industrial capabilities. The new techniques and solvers include:
1- Multiphase flow simulations
2- Fast and advanced temporal schemes
3- Turbulence models
4- Fluid Thermal coupling
5- Fluid structure interactions

The overall objective of ASIMIA has been achieved since academic and industrial HOM solvers have been developed and are now available, including the features above.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

ASIMIA has included international and intersectorial training. The intersectorial side has been ensured by each ESR spending a significant proportion of their time working in the industry, including Numeca/Cadence and different industrial sectors, namely aviation (Airbus), car aerodynamics (McLaren Racing). These industrial partners are recognized as being highly innovative in their fields and will provide stimulating and challenging applications to the ESR’s.

All ESRs have spent at least 50% of their time in industry and have attended local and network courses, conferences, performed secondments and published journal papers. Five ESRs enrolled the PHD program at UPM, more specifically at the School of Aeronautics (ETSIAE-UPM). Four have already defended their PhD dissertation obtaining the PhD in 2022-2023, while 1 has already submitted his PhD work, which has been approved by the Academic commission at UPM.

The project counts with 11 published journal papers (top Q1 journals), 5 more under review (available in Arxiv or zenodo) and conference proceedings. Despite the COVID19 pandemic, which covered the whole extend of the project, the ESRs attended conferences presenting their work in to international audiences. Throughout the 4 years of ASIMIA, 19 network courses have been provided to the ESR including technical topics and transferable skills. In addition, local training and language courses have been provided at NUMECA and UPM when visiting the facilities. Publications, and lecture notes developed during the project are available in the project website: https://asimia.eu/

ESR1 has developed advanced techniques for multiphase (Cahn-Hilliard eq.s) using HOM. ESR2 has developed efficient iterative solvers (explicit, implicit and semi-implicit) for steady and unsteady simulations using HOM are critical to obtain industrial level performances. ESR 3 has developed steady-state Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes solvers in the context of high-order simulations, and investigates hp-multigrid with explicit local-time-stepping as a technique to accelerate the convergence of this steady-state problem, including the influence of near-wall p-adaptation. ESR 4 has focused on fluid-thermal interactions, known as conjugate heat transfer are an important component of prediction methods for industrial applications of CFD, when strong interactions between hot elements and surrounding flows take place. ESR5 has developed fluid-structure interactions in HOM, which allows easy imposition of complex moving geometries, without the need of re-meshing. Additionally, we have provided new error analysis for these techniques allowing us to propose novel corrections and improvements of the state of the art for immersed boundaries.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Fluid mechanics and CFD are areas of expertise for the future, and the increasing demand for well-trained professionals in this field is continuously growing. ASIMIA's training and research activities have been oriented to give the ESRs a broad range of opportunities in industry and academia. After finishing their training and obtaining their PhD, the ESR have all find jobs in industry (2 in Numeca/Cadence, 1 in Ansys) or academia/research centres (1 Univ. Aachen and 1 in DLR). In summary, the ESRs have been prepared to play an active role in the development of European research, as they have developed understanding of how universities and industry can work together to fulfil common objectives. European industry sources indicate that there is a need for a larger number of skilled workers. This Industrial European Doctorate has provided the ESRs with a set of skills, which contribute to their personal development, improve their ability to undertake focused research, and help to transmit the results of their work to wider audiences, as well as to develop an understanding of how important is science to society. The program offers skills relevant to both the research undertaken within this project and to career beyond it. Long term ability of Europe to develop its own products of high technical quality heavily relies on European research, oriented towards results with direct industrial applications. ASIMIA seeks to strengthen European innovation capacity in the area of simulation methodologies. Engineers need to be adaptive leaders, grounded in a broad understanding of the practice and concepts of engineering, able to make decisions and possess managerial and leadership skills. The training offered by ASIMIA will help the ESRs to address the complex engineering and social problems of the future.

Regarding exploitation, Numeca/Cadence has ensure the development and exploitation of commercial code. Namely, Numeca’s software (renamed as Cadence) now includes high order version (see e.g. https://www.embedded.com/cadence-cfd-software-provides-10x-the-accuracy-of-standard-flow-solvers/). UPM-CCS has ensured the non-commercial exploitation of ASIMIA results, by including most development in the open access software https://github.com/loganoz/horses3d and 11 journal publications. Additionally, both industrial and academic software have been validated on complex geometries/cases including Aircraft, wings and formula 1 configurations, among others.

ASIMIA project