Time-Accurate Turbine Engine Simulation in a Parallel Computing Environment Part II - Software Alpha Test

The ability to rapidly execute a high-fidelity turbine engine simulation is essential in automating data validation processes during developmental engine testing. Further, execution of a simulation in real time enables validation of a continuously varying data stream concurrently with the data acquisition task.Component-level turbine engine simulations provide high-fidelity steady-state and time-accurate transient engine performance computations but are not typically applied in a real-time environment. This paper presents an approach for distributing a component-level simulation task in a parallel computing environment in an effort to achieve real-time operation.A turbine engine simulation was restructured to operate in a parallel computing environment and tested to quantify the resulting impact on simulation fidelity and execution time. A software acceptance test confirmed the viability of the parallel simulation approach and guided the formulation of refinements. The refinements were incorporated, and the program was reevaluated in terms of repeatability, speedup, and scalability. The approach, Software alpha test results, and direction of future work are summarized herein.