Development and Validation of Propellant Detonation and Propagation Modeling Methods Project

Testing of chemical rocket propulsion systems involves the potential for large energy explosions. The ability to predict these blast environments is critical to the safety of the test/launch facility. This project will determine a valid engineering-level approach for predicting cryo-vapor cloud detonations (VCD), which are the true source of the blast wave events. Specifically, the robustness and accuracy of reduced finite-rate chemistry mechanisms will be investigated and compared to more computationally intensive elaborate mechanisms. The validity of these mechanisms in predicting the VCD and its subsequent propagation through complex structures will be studied using the Loci/BLAST and Loci/CHEM Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) tools.