Modeling & Simulation for Optimization of Heavy-Fuel Micro Rotary Engines

The Department of Defense (DoD) is currently seeking strategies to provide efficient and dependable power systems for small unmanned systems. The engines must run on heavy fuel, be lightweight, produce high horsepower and have the ability to run in extreme environmental conditions. New technologies are needed to meet the DoD’s requirements for small, heavy-fuel engines, including injection systems, ignition components and air induction systems such as superchargers and turbochargers. Development of these new technologies can be greatly facilitated with the use of computational fluid dynamics and combustion modeling, however most codes are not able to adequately handle rotary engine concepts. With the development proposed in this program, the CONVERGE code, written by Convergent Science Inc., will be able to efficiently and accurately simulate rotary engines and also unconventional engine concepts such as the Nutating engine. Proposed objectives include adding the ability to handle sealing of adjacent surfaces, adding an arbitrary equation of motion for moving boundaries, and adding liquid properties for JP5 and/or JP8 fuel. These capabilities, coupled with the automatic and rapid grid generation of CONVERGE, will provide a tool that can be used in the design and optimization process of rotary engines operating on heavy fuel.