IFP Conference on Large-Eddy Simulation for Internal Combustion Engine Flows

4 November 2008

IFP is organizing an international conference exploring research on and the use of Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) applied to internal combustion engine (ICE) flows, injection and combustion. The conference runs 1-2 December, in Paris, France.

The LES for Internal Combustion Engine Flows (LES4ICE) conference aims to bring together engine designers and players in LES research worldwide and have them compare views on the state of the art in LES applied to ICEs and on the bottlenecks future research will have to overcome to pave the way to practical use of LES in the piston engine design process.

LES has become a topic of central interest in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applied to turbulent flows. LES can provide a bridge between the classical Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) approach, which gives access to an ensemble average by modelling, and Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS), which resolves the whole spectrum of flow scales without any turbulence modelling.

LES opens up new prospects for the use of CFD in the piston engine design process, according to IFP. The steady growth of computing power will make it possible to resolve the essential part of the flow energy in LES, yielding increasingly reliable results. In the next 10 years, this opens up the prospect of using LES for numerical investigations of engine aerodynamics capable of yielding reliable quantitative results that could potentially further reduce development times and costs for new concepts.