STREAMLINE NUMERICS, INC. — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: H10

Description

<p>The innovation proposed here is a high performance, high fidelity simulation capability to enable accurate, fast and robust simulation of coupled cavitation and fluid-structure interaction (FSI) in flows involving cryogenic fluids of interest to NASA (such as LOX, LH2, LCH4 or RP-1). Cavitation and other unsteady flow-induced phenomena in some components of liquid rocket engines as well as testing can induce not only high-cycle fatigue but also structure failure, and possibly extensive damages to these components. The proposed work seeks to deliver a robust computational modeling capability to accurately predict and model the transient fluid structure interaction between cryogenic fluids and immersed components to predict the dynamic loads, frequency response of NASA&rsquo;s test facilities, and to substantially reduce the costs of NASA&#39;s test and launch operations. The key features of the proposed work are: &nbsp;(a) Accurate and efficient unsteady cryogenic cavitation simulation methodology, and (b) A robust first principles based fluid-structure interaction (FSI) capability. &nbsp;Both these methodologies will be tightly coupled within the framework of the Loci-STREAM code which is a Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver already in use at NASA for a variety of applications. This project seeks to further improve the current cavitation models within Loci-STREAM to achieve production status at NASA for time-accurate simulations of cavitating flows and at the same time integrate a fluid-structure interaction (FSI) methodology into Loci-STREAM. This will involve upgrading the current cavitation models in Loci-STREAM, improving the numerics of the solution algorithm from an efficiency point of view, improving coupling of the cavitation models and the FSI module with Loci-STREAM, and assessing the predictive capability for cases relevant to NASA.</p>