PINCA: A scalable parallel program for compressible gas dynamics with nonequilibrium chemistry

This report documents an exploratory research work, funded by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) office at Sandia National Laboratories, to develop an advanced, general purpose, robust compressible flow solver for handling large, complex, chemically reacting gas dynamics problems. The deliverable of this project, a computer program called PINCA (Parallel INtegrated Computer Analysis) will run on massively parallel computers such as the Intel/Gamma and Intel/Paragon. With the development of this parallel compressible flow solver, engineers will be better able to address large three-dimensional scientific arid engineering problems involving multi-component gas mixtures with finite rate chemistry. These problems occur in high temperature industrial processes, combustion, and hypersonic: reentry of space-crafts.