Exascale Day Audio: Jackie Chen

Impact Area: Combustion Science

Jackie Chen, Sandia National Laboratories

Transcript

Hi, I’m Jackie Chen. I’m a computational combustion scientist at Sandia National Labs in the Combustion Research Facility. I’m the principal investigator of an exascale computing project called Pele Combustion. We’re developing a suite of adaptive mesh refinement combustion codes for first-principles high-fidelity simulations of turbulent combustion aimed at understanding detailed interactions between turbulent mixing and chemical reaction, which allow combustion to occur inside of an engine.

We’re excited about exascale computing because it will allow us to use high-performance computing resources as a numerical microscope, or probe, to actually get the details of mixing and reaction in different parts of an engine process. And this data will complement what is possible to obtain from experiments, which is somewhat limited even with advanced optical diagnostics because of the extreme conditions.

We envision that at the exascale, we’ll not only be able to solve these complicated turbulence chemistry interactions with our Pele suite of codes, but we’ll also be able to combine that with in situ data analytics, machine learning, and visualizations that are concurrent with our simulation.

The capabilities that we’re developing will account for not only the fine and coarse structure of turbulent flow and fine details of the chemistry, but it will also allow us to treat complicated geometries of piston bowl geometries or gas turbine geometries and multiphysics of spray evaporation, thermoradiation, and its coupling with emissions—for example, soot formation.