Code Saturne: A Finite Volume Code for the computation of turbulent incompressible flows - Industrial Applications

International audienceThis paper describes the finite volume method implemented in Code Saturne, Electricite de France general-purpose computational fluid dynamic code for laminar and turbulent flows in complex two and three- dimensional geometries. The code is used for industrial applications and research activities in several fields related to energy production (nuclear power thermal-hydraulics, gas and coal combustion, turbomachinery, heating, ventilation and air conditioning...). The set of equations considered consists of the Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible flows completed with equations for turbulence modelling (eddy-viscosity model and second moment closure) and for additional scalars (temperature, enthalpy, concentration of species, ...).The time-marching scheme is based on a prediction of velocity followed by a pressure correction step. Equations for turbulence and scalars are resolved separately afterwards. The discretization in space is based on the fully conservative, unstructured fi nite volume framework, with a fully colocated arrangement for all variables. Specic effort has been put into the computation of gradients at cell centres. Industrial applications illustrate important aspects of physical modelling such as turbulence (using Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations or Large Eddy Simulation), combustion, conjugate heat transfer (coupled with the thermal code SYRTHES ) and fluid-particle coupling with a lagrangian approach. These examples also demonstrate the capability of the code to tackle a large variety of meshes and cell geometries, including hybrid meshes with arbitrary interfaces