Partners with Energy

PSC collaborations with the Department of Energy

Improved Actions for Staggered Quarks

Magnetism in the Solar Dynamo:
University of Chicago

Rocket Science:
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Shock Waves in Gas:
California Institute of Technology

Turbines and Turbulence:
Stanford University

A New Picture of How Metals Deform

The Edge of Reality

Rocket Science

October 29, 1998: The NASA Space Shuttle blasts off with Senator John Glenn on board.

Solid-propellant rockets are the heavy lifters of the aerospace industry. They provide the immense thrust needed to launch large payloads into Earth orbit or outer space. Design of these rockets is a sophisticated problem drawing on a range of subdisciplines: ignition and combustion of composite energetic materials; solid mechanics of the propellant, its case, insulation and nozzle; fluid dynamics of the interior flow and exhaust plume; quantum chemistry of energetic materials; aging and damage of components; and analysis of potential failure modes.

The goal of the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is detailed, whole-system simulation of solid-propellant rockets at normal and abnormal operating conditions. Comprehensive simulation will provide a much safer, less expensive approach to the technological issues than traditional rocket design methods of trial and error. CSAR is using the solid rocket motor of the NASA space shuttle as its simulation vehicle, and scientists there have employed PSC's CRAY T3E to test and develop a range of simulation tools.

In large-scale calculations, Dinshaw Balsara and colleague C. W. Shu of Brown University tested a class of numerical schemes — algorithms — that can simulate turbulent flow which includes very large and very small eddies at the same time — complex structure like that occurring in the core of solid-propellant rockets. This kind of simulation is very demanding of computational capability, and high-quality algorithms use less computational firepower to accurately represent a wide spectrum of turbulence. The calculations by Balsara and Shu implemented effective strategies for "parallelizing" the software, achieving overall exceptional performance (32.6 gigaflops on 512 processors) with efficient scaling to very large systems, while allowing extension to increasingly high orders of accuracy.

"Being able to use PSC's T3E was extremely valuable," says CSAR managing director William Dick, "in our efforts to develop code that's easily portable to any parallel machine — an important goal of our ASCI research. The network connection to Pittsburgh is excellent, and support from PSC staff has been outstanding across all aspects of our work, including code optimization, parallelization, debugging — you name it. Our success in this work is also a PSC success."

NEXT: Shock Waves in Gas