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Jean-François Remacle
Professor
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After his Engineering Degree at the University of Liège in Belgium in 1992, Jean-François Remacle obtained in 1997 a Ph.D. from the same University. He then spent two years at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal as a post-doctoral fellow of Prof. F. Trochu, followed by three years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the research team of Prof. M. Shephard (one year as research associate followed by two years as research assistant professor).

It was during his stay at Rensselaer that Pr. Remacle started to work closely with Mark Shephard on mesh generation. Pr. Shephard's seminal work on mesh generation is one of the most important contributions ever. It was also during that stay that Pr. Remacle started the development of Gmsh, the open source mesh generator.

After these five years in Northern America, Jean-François Remacle joined the Université catholique de Louvain in 2002 as an assistant Professor. He then became Associate Professor in 2005 and Full Professor in 2012. In the following years of his return to Europe, Pr. Remacle dedicated a large part of his research to mesh generation.

IMMC main research direction(s):
Computational science

Keywords:
finite elements
mesh generation

Research group(s): MEMA

PhD and Post-doc researchers under my supervision:

Curvilinear mesh adaptation
Amaury Johnen

graduated as a physician engineer at the University of Liège (Belgium) in 2011. Then he accomplished a PhD in the topic of quadrangular mesh generation and cuvilinear mesh validation, under the supervision of professor Christophe Geuzaine. He started a postdoctoral research in January 2016 under the supervision of professor Jean-François Remacle for working on curvilinear mesh generation, hex-dominant mesh generation and mesh validation.

3D crossfield generation for multibloc decomposition
Alexandre Chemin

The aim of the project is to realize multibloc decomposition of 3D volumes in order to generate full hex meshes. Nowadays, this kind of decomposition is done by hand. The purpose of this work is to be able to do it in an automatic way. In order to reach this objective, we are generating 3D crossfields in this volume to locate singular points and automatize the decomposition.

Curvilinear mesh adaptation
Arthur Bawin

A pre-exascale Vortex Particle-mesh solver for complex Fluid-Structure Interaction problems.
Pierre Balty

We present an accurate and highly scalable vortex particle method builds upon a Multi-Resolution discretization (MR), an Immersed Interface Method (IIM) and efficient elliptic solvers to simulate bio-inspired locomotion in 3D. This project is intended to bring all the mentioned approaches together to the next scale of computational intensity and concurrency. The consistency between our Lagrangian formulation, these advanced numerical frameworks and a HPC-oriented implementation should unlock the full potential of Belgium’s next generation HPC architectures and thus, enable a leap in the scale of computable problems.

Three-dimensional multi-block decomposition for automatic hexahedral mesh generation and application to fluid flow simulations.
Mattéo Couplet

In computational physics, the vast majority of Partial Differential Equation (PDE) solvers rely on a spatial discretization of the bulk of the domain, typically a mesh. Thus far, geometrically complex domains are discretized predominantly using unstructured meshes, on which the PDE is subsequently solved using the Finite Element Method. Methods based on unstructured meshes are however inherently penalized in their computational efficiency. On the contrary, the regularity of block structured meshes can be leveraged to build efficient algorithms. For this reason, automatic generation of block-structured meshes is the holy grail of mesh generation.

A first objective of the research project is therefore to explore new approaches for generating multiblock decompositions of general 3D domains. We will build on the recent developments in 3D frame fields and aim at improving formulations based on the constrained minimization of an energy function. A second lead that will be explored is based on the decomposition of the domain in convex sub-regions, on which existing methods are more robust.

Constructing a new class of meshes is only relevant if those meshes are endowed with a true benefit in terms of CPU/GPU time and accuracy. A second objective is therefore to extend existing Computational Fluid
Dynamics technologies for Cartesian grids to multiblock grids. In particular, we want to take advantage of the conformal map-like nature of the mesh to increase computational performance, and also show how our methodology can be applied to models with moving or deforming boundaries.

PFEM - FSI
Thomas Leyssens

A PFEM-FEM computational framework for fluid-structure interactions including free surface flows and large elastic-plastic deformation of structures leading to fracture
Antoine Quiriny

PFEM