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NAS FEATURED NEWS
Columbia Speeds Evaluation of Proposed Shuttle Tank Redesign
NAS Division engineers employ the power of the Columbia supercomputer to help evaluate proposed redesigns for the Space Shuttle's External Tank.
09.13.06
Joining forces with NASA's Space Shuttle Program, two engineers from the NAS Division performed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of the Space Shuttle Launch Vehicle during ascent, to help analyze a potential design change to the External Tank. The CFD simulations consumed a total of 264,000 processor-hours on NASA's 10,240-processor Columbia supercomputer during a three-week period in August.
The proposed design change involves replacing 11 of the ice/frost ramps on the liquid hydrogen (LH2) tank located on the bottom portion of the External Tank. A new design dubbed 'Concept A' was used in the analysis -- this design uses titanium boxes and minimizes the amount of foam used to build the ramps.
Caption: (Above right) Surface grids around one of the 'Concept A' ice/frost ramps on the liquid hydrogen portion of the External Tank. Also shown are the cable tray and two pressure lines. Credit: Stuart Rogers, NAS Division
(Click on image to enlarge.)
"These simulations are providing the Space Shuttle Program with an unprecedented understanding of the aerodynamics during shuttle ascent. These would not be possible without the Columbia supercomputer," said NAS aerospace engineer Stuart Rogers, who completed the simulations with engineer Ed Tejnil.
The grid system for the entire ascent vehicle uses over 78 million grid points to define the geometry in great detail. Simulations at 66 different flight conditions during ascent were run, each requiring about 4,000 processor-hours to complete.
Most of these cases, which were designed to study the aerothermal environment or the aerodynamic loads resulting from the design change, were run on two of Columbia's 512-processor nodes designated for NASA's Space Operations work. In order to speed up the simulation runs, NAS staff set up dedicated access to an additional 512-CPU node, allowing all 66 cases to be completed in less than 20 days. The simulations used the MPI-based version of the NASA-developed Overflow-2 CFD solver.
The results from these simulations were delivered to engineers at NASA Johnson Space Center who are studying them to understand the impacts of the proposed design change on the aerodynamic and heating loads on the External Tank. This work is continuing with additional CFD analysis of another potential design of the ice/frost ramps known as 'Concept B'.
For more information on these NAS CFD simulations:
Edward Tejnil,
tejnil@nas.nasa.gov
Stuart Rogers, rogers@nas.nasa.gov
For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit
http://www.nasa.gov/home/
- Jill Dunbar
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