Development of numerical simulations of rocket combustion chambers

Abstract

The paper discusses the development of numerical simulations of rocket combustion chambers the last 20 years and their future development in the next 20 years, the state of numerical simulations of combustion in the USA, Japan, Germany, Italy, and France. At present, the state of the numerical modelling of rocket combustion chambers is determined by the development of computing technologies, economic factors and the current state of the theory of turbulence. The report discusses the impact of each of these factors. Since 2015, there is a significant slowdown in processor performance to 3% per year [1]. The speedup of computations due to the parallelization of computations is in turn limited by the Amdahl’s law [2]. The theories of turbulence and turbulent combustion have developed very slowly over the past 20 years. A partial way out of the deep crisis of the turbulence theory is the development of hybrid LES/RANS models. Despite the stagnation, the methods for the numerical simulation of rocket combustion chambers still have an untapped development potential constrained by economic factors: lack of investment and suboptimal management. At present, the time spent on a simulation of a rocket combustion chamber primarily depends on the experience and the knowledge of the researcher. The actual computational time amounts to 0.1–0.01 fraction of the total time spent on modelling. Therefore, the development of the numerical modelling of rocket combustion chambers is possible through the elimination of constraining economic factors and establishing a system of generation and accumulation of experience and knowledge. References [1] Hennessy, J.L. and Patterson, D.A. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Sixth Edition. Elsevier, New York, 2018. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law The paper discusses the development of numerical simulations of rocket combustion chambers the last 20 years and their future next 20 years. The theories of turbulence and turbulent combustion have developed very slowly over the past 20 years. However, the numerical simulations of rocket combustion chambers still have an untapped potential.