Computational Fluid Dynamics Team

About us: CFD at CERN

The CFD activity started in the Cooling and Ventilation group around 1993 when a technical student was appointed to work 100% on these studies. From that time on a number of young engineers (technical students, fellows, project associates, UPAS, trainees) took over this activity spending short to medium periods at CERN.

In 2004 when the TS department (today Engineering EN department) was created, the CV group decided to structure this activity into a formal team. At that moment about six young engineers were working on CFD so a team was created in the Detector Cooling section. Since February 2012, the team is part of the Project and CFD (PJ) section. Nowadays, the team counts with an average of five members spending between one to two years in the team.

Most part of CFD applications at CERN are concerned with thermal-convection problems: natural, forced or mixed convection effects in and around the experiment detectors and sub-detectors. However, the team offers its services to all CERN units requiring solutions within the range of the CFD applications. Example studies include room ventilation, fire and operational safety.

The team uses ANSYS Fluent^®, commercial, general purpose CFD code. ANSYS Fluent® is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) driven pre/post-processing environment that delivers a useful set of tools to set up, automatically mesh, run the analysis and post-process the results.

The team also uses OpenFOAM, which is a free, open source CFD software package produced by a commercial company, OpenCFD Ltd. OpenFOAM has an extensive range of features to solve anything from complex fluid flows involving chemical reactions, turbulence and heat transfer, to solid dynamics and electromagnetics. It includes tools for meshing, notably SnappyHexMesh, a parallelised mesher for complex CAD geometries, and for pre- and post-processing. Almost everything (including meshing, and pre- and post-processing) runs in parallel as standard, enabling users to take full advantage of computer hardware at their disposal.

To run the codes at high performance, the CERN batch computing service is used. The CERN batch computing service currently consists of around 30,000 CPU cores running Platform LSF® providing computing power to the CERN experiments for tasks such as physics event reconstruction, data analysis and physics simulations.

The future of the team depends on the next evolution of CERN projects and on the efficiency enhancement of the simulation studies.

 

CFD Team Members

Section Leader:

Michele Battistin Building/Floor/Office: 35/1-014 Telephone 1: 78087 (from outside: +41 22 76 78087) Portable: 164251 (from outside: +41 76 487 4251) Fax: 68749 (from outside: +41 22 76 68749)

Technical Coordinator:

Enrico Da Riva Building/Floor/Office: 298/1-009 Telephone 1: 77763 (from outside: +41 22 76 77763) Portable: 165975 (from outside: +41 76 487 5975) Fax: 67854 (from outside: +41 22 76 67854)

Technical Student:

Gennaro Bozza Building/Floor/Office: 298/1-011 Telephone 1: 70644 (from outside: +41 22 76 70644)

PhD Student:

Manuel Gomez Marzoa Building/Floor/Office: 298/1-009 Telephone 1: 77763 (from outside: +41 22 76 77763)

 

PhD Student: (PH/CMX collaboration)

Michael Plagge Building/Floor/Office: 298/1-009 Telephone 1: 77763 (from outside: +41 22 76 77763)

 

Trainee:

Vinod Singh Rao Building/Floor/Office: 298/1-009 Telephone 1: 77763 (from outside: +41 22 76 77763)

 

For further information about buildings and mailboxes, consider visiting the CERN Phonebook.