Automated, Fast CFD Solver Technologies for Hypersonics

This proposal seeks to produce an approachable, ìsingle click-to-solutionî, software tool capable of producing high quality laminar solutions of hypersonic wall-bounded flows. Laminar to turbulence boundary layer transition poses a difficult challenge in hypersonic vehicle design. Large uncertainties drive design requirements to be overly cautious in thermal protection systems and control design due to assumed heating and drag augmentation imposed by the presence of a turbulence boundary layer.ÝAdvances in stability analysis provide increased accuracy on transition location over heritage methods, but require high-fidelity simulated base flows to operate on. High-fidelity simulations of hypersonic flows currently require access to high-performance computers, robust numerics, complicated solver interfaces/operation, involved pre- and post-processing analysis, artisan level mesh generation skills, and more. These factors present a large barrier to entry to those who are familiar with the physics of high-enthalpy environments.ÝGHI proposes a simplified software tool capable of producing laminar solutions on modern CPU/GPU workstations. The solutions will be high-fidelity and used to perform more modern stability analysis to predict transition locations more accurate as compared to heritage correlations. GHI will leverage current and past efforts in software development and hypersonic simulations to package an approachable tool capable of generating laminar flows accurate enough to perform stability analysis on. The tool will automatically generate meshes, identify critical flow features and re-generate or refine the computational mesh, removing the requirement of mesh generation and speeding up time to solution. The multi-step mesh generation process will ultimately yield accurate laminar flowfields.Ý The end product will be a single interface that non-advanced users can interact with on a modern CPU/GPU desktop PC and generate solutions with a 10x speed up over current state-of-the-art solvers. The solutions will be available in data formats consistent with current stability analysis tools.