The CFD Team is part of the Projects and CFD (PJ) Section of the Cooling and Ventilation(CV) Group in the Engineering (EN) Department at CERN. Our mission is to provide engineers, physicists and scientists working on all CERN units, with flow and thermal analysis using CFD tools and methods to solve fluid flow and heat transfer related problems. In particular, we provide assistance to the LHC machine and detectors during the prototype, design and development phases of their components.

The team has considerable experience in solving fluid flow and heat transfer problems in high energy particle detectors. The bulk of studies performed are mainly convection related, which is particularly relevant to the cooling of detector components. The main solutions sought are the flow field, heat transfer distribution and temperature map for a given configuration. However, a number of studies were also developed in areas such as operational safety and room ventilation. The analysis are carried out by using two CFD software: ANSYS Fluent® and OpenFOAM. CFD studies are run on the Windows HPC cluster, which currently consists of around 1024 cores and 12 TBytes of RAM.

Our range of services include:

• problem analysis

• simulation strategy definition

• choice of best CFD methodology to apply to a specific process

• geometry and mesh generation

• parametric studies

• post processing and reporting

See introduction of the team at the Swiss ANSYS conference and 12th CADFEM forum, September 2015 (in French) and the Hungarian ANSYS User Group Meeting, November 2015 (in English).