HERACLES is a 3D hydrodynamical code used to simulate astrophysical fluid flows. It uses a finite volume method on fixed grids to solve the equations of hydrodynamics, MHD, radiative transfer and gravity. This software is developed at the Service d'Astrophysique, CEA/Saclay as part of the COAST project and is registered under the CeCILL license.
The code is developed by:
• Code architecture: Edouard Audit
• Parallelization: Edouard Audit
• Hydrodynamics: Edouard Audit
• Radiative transfer: Matthias González, Edouard Audit & Neil Vaytet
• MHD: Sebastien Fromang, Patrick Hennebelle & Romain Teyssier
• Gravity: Pascal Tremblin
• HDF5 output: Bruno Thooris
• Website: Neil Vaytet
HERACLES simulates astrophysical fluid flows using a grid based Eulerian finite volume Godunov method. It is capable of simulating pure hydrodynamical flows, magneto-hydrodynamic flows, radiation hydrodynamic flows (using either flux limited diffusion or the M1 moment method), self-gravitating flows using a Poisson solver or all of the above. HERACLES uses cartesian, spherical and cylindrical grids. Current ongoing developments include a multi-grid method and a multi-group scheme for the radiative transfer.
The full package can be downloaded here: heracles.tar.gz
Current version: 2.0 (20 September 2010)
Version history