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Fire: An open-source adaptive mesh refinement solver for supersonic reacting flows

  • E. Fan
  • , Tianhan Zhang
  • , Jiaao Hao
  • , Chih Yung Wen
  • , Lisong Shi*
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • Southern University of Science and Technology
  • Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

In this study, we introduce Fire, an open-source adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) solver for supersonic reacting flows, and conduct theoretical analyses on the efficiency of AMR methods. Fire is developed within the AMR framework of ECOGEN (Schmidmayer et al., 2020). To accurately model compressible multi-component reacting flows, the Fire solver employs the thermally perfect gas model for multi-species gaseous mixtures, mixture-averaged transport models for viscous fluxes, and detailed finite-rate chemistry for combustion processes. The solver utilizes the Harten-Lax-van Leer Contact approximate Riemann solver with low-Mach number correction to evaluate inviscid fluxes, demonstrating its superiority over the traditional Harten-Lax-van Leer Contact solver on detonation simulations. Moreover, we deduce the theoretical speedup ratio (denoted as ηthe) of AMR methods over uniform-grid methods by analyzing the advancing procedures. This theoretical analysis is well-supported by the numerical speedup ratio (denoted as ηnum) given by numerical tests. To further enhance computational efficiency, we propose a three-stage AMR strategy specifically tailored to the characteristics of inert flows, flame fronts, and shock-flame interactions. Comprehensive validation tests, encompassing unsteady convection and diffusion, planar deflagration, inert and reacting shock-bubble interactions, planar detonations, and detonation cellular structures, confirm the accuracy and efficiency of Fire in simulating supersonic combustions. We anticipate that this work will not only serve as a valuable numerical tool for supersonic reacting flows research but also contribute to a deeper understanding and improvement of AMR methodologies.

Original languageEnglish
Article number109881
JournalComputer Physics Communications
Volume318
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2026
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Adaptive mesh refinement
  • Detonation
  • Reacting shock-bubble interaction
  • Supersonic reacting flow

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