National Combustion Code: A Multidisciplinary Combustor Design System

The Internal Fluid Mechanics Division conducts both basic research and technology, and system technology research for aerospace propulsion systems components. The research within the division, which is both computational and experimental, is aimed at improving fundamental understanding of flow physics in inlets, ducts, nozzles, turbomachinery, and combustors. This article and the following three articles highlight some of the work accomplished in 1996.

A multidisciplinary combustor design system is critical for optimizing the combustor design process. Such a system should include sophisticated computer-aided design (CAD) tools for geometry creation, advanced mesh generators for creating solid model representations, a common framework for fluid flow and structural analyses, modern postprocessing tools, and parallel processing. The goal of the present effort is to develop some of the enabling technologies and to demonstrate their overall performance in an integrated system called the National Combustion Code.

The development of the National Combustion Code is currently being pursued under a NASA/Department of Defense/Department of Energy/U.S. industry partnership. Recent efforts have been focused on developing a computational combustion dynamics capability that meets combustor designer requirements for model accuracy and analysis turnaround time, incorporating both short­term and long­term technology goals. As a first step, a baseline solver for turbulent combustion flows, CORSAIR­CCD, was developed under a joint modeling and code development effort between Pratt & Whitney and the NASA Lewis Research Center. CORSAIR­CCD is a Navier­Stokes flow solver based on an explicit four-stage Runge­Kutta scheme that uses unstructured meshes and runs on networked workstations. The solver can be linked to any computer-aided design system via the Patran file system. Turbulence closure is obtained via the standard k­e model with a high Reynolds number wall function. The following combustion models have been implemented into the code: finite­rate chemical kinetics emulations for Jet­A and methane fuels, turbulence­chemistry interactions via an assumed probability density function for temperature fluctuations, and thermal emissions of nitrogen oxides. CORSAIR­CCD can switch between a parallel virtual machine (PVM) interface and a message-passing interface (MPI) by using compiler flags. Its parallel performance on several platforms has been analyzed, and on the basis of the results, several improvements have been made.

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Last updated April 29, 1997

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