The US Air Force, GE Aircraft Engines, Aerojet, Pratt & Whitney-Rocketdyne, and Rolls-Royce are all major players in the field of airbreathing and rocket engine design and have expressed a high level of interest in development of high-fidelity engine design tools like reacting flow LES. Problems with combustion stability, for example, often appear late in an engine development program and can be quite difficult and costly to fix, but could be detected early enough to change inexpensively with high-fidelity computational tools. Other potential applications of our technology include better rocket plume simulations to more accurately predict radar and infrared signatures and base heating loads, industrial chemical processes, and automobile engine design to help reduce pollutant formation.
Incorporating fast reacting flow chemistry into LES calculations would represent an enabling technology and would be of great interest to NASA and the rest of the CFD community. Several groups at NASA would benefit from our project; NASA Glenn Research Center is developing the National Combustion Code (NCC) to aid in the design of rocket and gas turbine aircraft engines, while Wind-US, and VULCAN (developed at NASA-Langley), are two other NASA reacting flow CFD codes that could benefit from this research. The ability to accurately predict performance of hypersonic airbreathing systems burning higher hydrocarbons would be immediately useful.
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