Onera is a national aerospace research centre in France which contributes to the development of aerospace technology thanks to its fundamental and applied research activities. The applied research carried out at Onera complements the work done by academic laboratories, not only by suppoting long and medium-term projects but also by providing direct assistance to the industry. Onera is composed of four major scientific branches: Fluid Mechanics and Energy, Physics, Materials and Structural Mechanics, and Information Technology and Systems. These four branches are organised into 16 scientific departments, each enjoying a wide degree of operational independence. In other words, Onera is involved in nearly all scientific disciplines needed to drive progress in aerospace. Many of Onera’s scientists also participate to training activities at universities and engineering schools.
Within the Fluid Mechanics and Energy branch, the CFD department focuses on the development of accurate, robust, and efficient numerical methods as well as of reliable user-friendly software packages. The finite volume (FV) elsA software for complex external and internal flow simulations and the CEDRE software for multidisciplinary applications are largely used both by research teams and by major French and European aerospace manufacturers as daily desing tools. Our CFD solvers are used by aerospace industry players to predict and optimize the performance of airplanes, helicopters, turbomachinery, launch vehicles and missiles.
With the aim of overcoming the limitations of FV second-order methods, Onera has recently started the development of a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) solver called Aghora. The solver Aghora integrates efficient high-order DG schemes for the simulation of steady and unsteady turbulent flows on hybrid meshes. Different levels of modeling are considered, namely, RANS, hybrid RANS/LES, LES, and DNS. Aghora has been used in the framework of past European projects (ANADE, IDIHOM) and is used in the current ITN SSeMID and the European project TILDA, as well as in the French project ELCI.
Flow instability and sensitivity analyses have been a major topic in the Experimental and Fundamental Aerodynamics Department. Theoretical approaches based on the linearized and adjoint equations have been developed to investigate two-dimensional incompressible and compressible flow regimes, in laminar or turbulent states. Numerical tools relying on the high-order Discontinuous Galerkin solver Aghora, are currently developed to investigate more complex and three-dimensional flow configurations. The SSeMID project aims at supporting ONERA in this direction.
