ERC Synergy grants are designed to address complex challenges that are developed by international consortia and have one of the largest budgets of any European Commission grant
Oriol Lehmkuhl is one of the principal investigators of the TRANSDIFFUSE project, which aims to develop an AI model that will revolutionise propulsion technologies and lay the foundations for a future hydrogen-based engine
The TRANSDIFFUSE project, with the participation of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), has obtained nearly 10 million euros from a Synergy Grant (SyG) from the European Research Council (ERC) in the 2024 call, one of the most prestigious and competitive funding modalities in the European Union.
TRANSDIFFUSE presents an ambitious programme to develop an innovative Artificial Intelligence (AI) based model that could revolutionise propulsion technologies. The project promises a significant impact on the transition towards cleaner and more efficient aviation and energy generation.
The consortium brings together the numerical modelling expertise of Eusebio de Valero's group at the Aeronautics School of the Polytechnic University of Madrid - Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM), which coordinates the project, the high-performance computational capabilities of Oriol Lehmkuhl's group at BSC and the experimental techniques of Guillermo Paniagua, from Purdue University in the United States.
Main objectives of the project
One of the main innovations of TRANSDIFFUSE will be the creation of FluidGPT, an AI-based model that is expected to generate significant advances in sustainable energy, such as the development of pressurised hydrogen combustion (PGC) engines. These innovative compact and lightweight turbines promise to be highly efficient, redesigning propulsion standards in aeronautics and power generation systems.
The challenge addressed by the project is the control of the transonic flows generated from the combustion chamber, a challenge that has hindered the design of compact turbomachinery. Through FluidGPT, the consortium aims to characterise, predict and manipulate these complex and unstable flows, thus unlocking the development of transonic diffusive passages, a critical component in new engines demanding efficiency and compactness.
TRANSDIFFUSE will lay the foundation for the development of a hydrogen-based engine, but the findings and new methods will extend far beyond that. The impact on industry could therefore be significant as the research results have the potential to revolutionise sectors such as aeronautics, wind energy or vehicle propulsion, and benefit other areas such as chemical engineering, bioengineering or even economics.
BSC's contribution
BSC, through the Large-Scale Computational Fluid Dynamics group led by Lehmkuhl, will play a key role in the project by using its expertise in scale resolution methods and high-performance computing. Using MareNostrum 5, one of Europe's most powerful supercomputers, the BSC team will employ simulation tools to perform detailed analyses of fluid flow behaviour in high-velocity environments.
These simulations will improve our understanding of flow stability and identify important interactions in transonic flows, which occur close to the speed of sound. The data generated by these simulations will be essential for building the AI-based model that the project aims to develop, which will be able to learn and predict transonic flow instabilities. Accurately predicting these instabilities is crucial for a variety of applications, such as the design of aircraft, automobiles and spacecraft. By better understanding these flow phenomena, engineers can create more efficient, safer and more reliable systems.
ERC and Synergy Grants
The ERC, established by the European Union in 2007, is the main European funding organisation for research excellence in all areas of knowledge, with a budget representing 17% of the overall budget of the current Horizon Europe Framework Programme.
Among the ERC's different programmes, the G&G is the only one in which up to four Principal Investigators participate collaboratively to address complex challenges at the frontier of scientific knowledge that could not be effectively tackled by a single researcher. Scientists can come from different research institutions, including outside Europe. It provides funding of up to ¤10 million for these projects, which can last up to 6 years.
TRANSDIFFUSE is the only project that explores new lines in propulsion and fluid mechanics of the 57 that have obtained funding in the 2024 SyG call, eleven of them with groups in Spanish entities. The funded projects will involve 201 researchers who will be hosted in 184 institutions in 24 different member and associate countries. 22 of the groups include researchers based at institutions outside Europe, including the United States as in the TRANSDIFFUSE project.