Binary stars evolve into chemically-peculiar objects or binary compact objects, releasing significant amounts of enriched gas, making them the main driver of the Galactic enrichment in heavy elements (and for some of those, the only driver). During their evolution, they go through a series of interactions, among which tides are the most common kind.

To pin down tidal interactions and the evolution of binary stars, we implement an updated prescription in the stellar population code binary_c. Relying on Zahn's theory of tides, and on grids of MESA main-sequence models covering an extensive mass range (0.1 to 320Msun), we use detailed structural quantities to derive the parameters lambda and E2 that rule equilibrium and dynamical tides respectively. We augment the ubiquitous BSE implementation by adding those parameters in the binary_c code.

I will present a few applications of this new determination of circularisation and synchronisation timescales: rates of stellar mergers, gamma-ray bursts and gravitational wave progenitors are updated, while the comparison between the derived and observed period-eccentricity diagrams for clusters provides an accurate estimate of their ages.