Modeling of Supersonic Combustor Flows Using Parallel Computing

Abstract

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has matured rapidly in the past 20 years and is now an important tool for analyzing and understanding complex fluid flows. Since 1985, CFD has played a vital role in the study of hypersonic flight. It has provided the capability for scientists and engineers to model both internal and external hypersonic flow-fields. Such flows are often impractical or impossible to analyze in laboratory conditions. In particular, the recent application of CFD to the modeling of internal reacting supersonic combustor flows has significantly advanced the understanding of such flows and has increased confidence in the predictive ability of codes. The purpose of these efforts has been to provide the hypersonic propulsion community with realistic large-scale applications of CFD and to use these solutions in direct support of engineering analysis and design of hypersonic vehicles. Although these applications have been successful to date, expectations and requirements are increasing dramatically for both faster turn-around of solutions and for more detailed and accurate solutions (hence requiring greater computational mesh refinement, more complete chemistry and turbulence models, etc.). In order to begin to meet these requirements, a ten-fold or greater increase in computational efficiency is required, relative to current supercomputing capabilities. This increase can be achieved easily by suitably programming existing CFD technology on existing distributed memory parallel computing machines or multicomputers. This paper presents and analyzes the results obtained to date in an investigation aimed at the application of parallel computing to the simulation of scramjet combustor flow-fields.

Department(s)

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Second Department

Computer Science

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 1992 Elsevier, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 1992

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