Mesh Generation and Adaption for High Reynolds Number RANS Computations

The innovation of our Phase II STTR program is to develop and provide to NASA automatic mesh generation software for the simulation of fluid flows using Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes codes. As a result of the successful Phase I work, these new tools are now capable of generating high-quality, highly-stretched (anisotropic) meshes in boundary layer regions and transition smoothly to inviscid flow regions, even in an adaptive context. The significance is that our method has the ability to generate a boundary layer mesh while keeping intact the previous adaptation procedures from non viscous simulations. This leads to a natural coupling between boundary layer mesh generation and anisotropic mesh adaptation. All of the Phase I objectives were met and all tasks were completed successfully. The Phase II project will include improvements in surface remeshing, coding for optimal speed and increased robustness of the solvers, adding a mesh optimization module, providing a link to general CAD packages, include unsteady coupling where the boundary layer mesh refinement evolves in time, conduct further validation and verification on NASA models by running flow cases with our solver, documenting the project, and delivering the new meshing software to NASA.

There are important commercial problems that can directly use and benefit from the application of our software. Some example industries and applications are: Analysis of nuclear blast accidents from power plants: Automobile manufacturers for design of car and truck engines, transmissions and issues including engine cooling, under-hood flows, and air bag design: Airline companies who are responsible for maintaining safe flying machines: Watercraft design for safety concerns: Bio-Medical applications such as blood flow in elastic arteries, hearts, and air flow in lungs: Computer simulation of blast waves for use in anti-terrorists investigations: Housing design for protection from hurricanes, and tornados: The entertainment industry and film makers for taping building and bridge collapse, bombs blowing up buildings, and storms destroying structures: Heating and air conditioning manufacturers for home units, large office complexes and automobile air conditioning systems.

Next generation Space Launch Systems are being designed at NASA for access to space. These include launch configurations for earth-to-orbit to access the International Space Station and to launch modules for eventual landing on asteroids and moons and entry into the Mars atmosphere. Design of new and powerful propulsion systems will be a major requirement for this new generation aerospace flight hardware. Launch pad design, with rocket plume trenches, for these new booster configurations also requires high fidelity base flow and heating predictions. Our proposed program addresses the time-critical technology development item by providing a new anisotropic meshing code to address high Reynolds number viscous flow fields. The software to be provided in this SBIR project is a computational capability which is critical for design and analysis of these next generation space vehicles.

This is a mature technology (TRL 8) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.