Computational Fluid Mechanics

In Fluid Mechanics, research concerns the physics and modeling of industrial and natural flows. It is focused on the analysis and understanding of fundamental phenomena related to instabilities and turbulence, and more generally on a better understanding of mass and heat transfer in flows. The main fields of application are transport, energy and environment. The teams are developing a wide range of expertise from internal and external aerodynamics, hydrodynamics, supercritical fluid flows, microfluidics, granular flows, plasma flows in tokamaks, to forest fires and larger scale geophysical flows. Beyond fundamental research based on the increase of knowledge, our activity concerns the improvement of our predictive and control capabilities of these flows, with the key to the optimization of the associated industrial products and processes. This research is based on advanced numerical simulation of the equations of dynamics with strong skills in theoretical modeling of instabilities and thermodynamics of nonequilibrium systems. The numerical simulation, strong axis of the laboratory, is implemented on different platforms from the local level on the cluster of the laboratory and the Meso Center of the University of Aix-Marseille, to the national level on large computing centers (IDRIS, CINES).