Integrated 3-D simulation of solid propellant rockets

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper presents an overview of research activities at the Center for Simulation of Ad-vanced Rockets (CSAR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. CSAR is one of fiveuniversity-based research centers funded by the U. S. Department of Energy as part of the Accel-erated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). The purpose of ASCI is to advance the state of theart in computational simulation of complex, multicomponent systems and to provide the compu-tational hardware and infrastructure necessary to carry out very large-scale simulations. CSAR isusing the solid rocket boosters of the NASA Space Shuttle as the simulation vehicle. Now at thebeginning of the fourth year of our ten-year pro-gram, the implementation of a fully integratedsimulation code is nearly complete and is ex-pected to be finished before the end of 2000. Itprovides a characterization of various burn sce-narios and the onset of potential component fail-ures. Other sub-scale rockets have been simulatedto provide verification data for CSAR codes. Re-fined multiscale component models and advancedsystem integration concepts based on lessonslearned from our current work constitute the keyfeatures in the second-generation code targetedfor the next few years.