STREAMLINE NUMERICS, INC. — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: AF18B-T010

Description

The objective is to develop zonal multi-physics capability for turbulent combustion simulations. The foundation of the proposed work is a novel Pareto-Efficient Combustion (PEC) framework for fidelity-adaptive combustion modeling. The PEC model utilizes a combustion submodel assignment, combining the low-cost flamelet-based models with the more expensive finite rate chemistry models where necessary. The complex flows encountered in rocket engines include fluids and flows which transition between multiple modeling regimes. The nature of the PEC model condones the inclusion of additional models which can capture those different regimes of fluid physics. That model transition is important for local thermodynamic and transport properties, the treatment of turbulence, the treatment of chemical reactions and combustion, and turbulence-chemistry interaction. The developments in this work would improve internal consistency of fluid properties, which can greatly vary when switching from a critical fluid to essentially an ideal fluid, as well as help reduce computational costs by applying the more computationally expensive models only where necessary. Furthermore, tying the selection of turbulence treatment (such LES, DES and URANS) to a figure of merit rather than strictly the local mesh density has the potential to both improve fidelity of the simulation as well as limit computational cost.