Aircraft Gas Turbine Engine Simulations

The Center for Integrated Turbulence Simulations (CITS) was created in October of 1997 under the sponsorship of the Department of Energy (DoE) Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) Alliance program. The over-arching problem to be solved by this Center is the detailed, high-fidelity simulation of the flowpath through complete aircraft gas turbines including the compressor, combustor, turbine, and secondary flow systems. In order to support this goal, three groups were created to tackle the main components of the program. The turbomachinery group has developed a multiblockstructured, unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) solver called TFLO which is used for the rotating components of the flowpath (compressor and turbine) and for the secondary flow system. The combustion group is responsible for the flow in the combustor and compressor diffuser. Given the complexity of the flow in this region of the engine, an unstructured Large Eddy Simulation (LES) solver called CDP has been developed and validated together with various approaches for combustion simulation and spray tracking. A significant portion of the work in the Center is the integration between the various physics and components being modeled. For this purpose, an integration group is working towards the development of interface definitions for arbitrary URANS and LES solvers. An important aspect of the problems to be solved is that they are of such magnitude and complexity that they require the largest available supercomputers. For this reason, a major thrust of the Center is on the parallel implementation of the solver software and its integration on massively parallel computing platforms. This paper presents some of the major results from each of the three groups in the Center.