Next articleWork is being done at three universities to help today's NASA engineers use the knowledge and experience of their Apolloera predecessors in designing liquid rocket engines. Groundbreaking work is being done in important subject areas to create a prototype of the most important functions for the Rocket Engine Numerical Simulator (RENS).
The goal of RENS is to develop an interactive, realtime
application that engineers can utilize for comprehensive preliminary
propulsion system design functions. RENS will employ computer
science and artificial intelligence research in knowledge acquisition,
computer code parallelization and objectification, expert system
architecture design, and object-oriented programming.
In 1995, a 3year grant from the NASA Lewis Research Center was awarded to Dr. Douglas Moreman and Dr. John Dyer of Southern University at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to begin acquiring knowledge in liquid rocket propulsion systems. Resources of the University of West Florida in Pensacola were enlisted to begin the process of enlisting knowledge from senior NASA engineers who are recognized experts in liquid rocket engine propulsion systems. Dr. John Coffey of the University of West Florida is utilizing his expertise in interviewing and concept mapping techniques to encode, classify, and integrate information obtained through personal interviews. The expertise extracted from the NASA engineers has been put into concept maps with supporting textual, audio, graphic, and video material. A fundamental concept map was delivered by the end of the first year of work and the development of maps containing increasing amounts of information is continuing.
In 1996, the Southern University/University of West Florida team
conducted a 4day group interview with a panel of five experts
to discuss failures of the RL10 rocket engine in conjunction
with the Centaur launch vehicle. The discussion was recorded on
video and audio tape. Transcriptions of the entire proceedings
and an abbreviated video presentation of the discussion highlights
are under development. Also in 1996, two additional 3year
grants were awarded to conduct parallel efforts that would complement
the work being done by Southern University and the University
of West Florida.
Dr. Prem Bhalla of Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi, is developing the architectural framework for RENS. By employing the Rose Rational language and Booch Object Oriented Programming (OOP) technology, Dr. Bhalla is developing the basic structure of RENS by identifying and encoding propulsion system components, their individual characteristics, and crossfunctionality and dependencies.
Dr. Ruknet Cezzar of Hampton University, located in Hampton, Virginia, began working on the parallelization and objectification of rocket engine analysis and design codes. Dr. Cezzar will use the Turbo C++ OOP language to translate important liquid rocket engine computer codes from FORTRAN and permit their inclusion into the RENS framework being developed at Jackson State University.
The Southern University/University of West Florida grant was extended
by 1 year to coordinate the conclusion of all three efforts in
1999.
Booch, G.: ObjectOriented Analysis and Design With Applications.
Second edition, The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, Inc.,
Redwood City, CA, 1994.
Previous articleLast updated March 23, 1998,
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