Time-Dependent Simulations of Turbopump Flows

The objective of the current effort is to provide a computational framework for design and analysis of the entire fuel supply system of a liquid rocket engine, including high-fidelity unsteady turbopump flow analysis. This capability is needed to support the design of pump sub-systems for advanced space transportation vehicles that are likely to involve liquid propulsion systems. To date, computational tools for design/analysis of turbopump flows are based on relatively lower fidelity methods. An unsteady, three-dimensional viscous flow analysis tool involving stationary and rotational components for the entire turbopump assembly has not been available for real-world engineering applications. The present effort will provide developers with information such as transient flow phenomena at start up, impact of non-uniform inflows, system vibration and impact on the structure. In the proposed paper, the progress toward the capability of complete simulation of the turbo-pump for a liquid rocket engine is reported. The Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) turbo-pump is used as a test case for evaluation of the hybrid MPI/Open-MP and MLP versions of the INS3D code. The relative motion of the grid systems for the rotor-stator interaction was obtained using overset grid techniques. Time-accuracy of the scheme has been evaluated with simple test cases. Unsteady computations for the SSME turbo-pump, which contains 114 zones with 34.5 million grid points, are carried out on Origin 2000 systems at NASA Ames Research Center. Results from these time-accurate simulations with moving boundary capability will be presented along with the performance of parallel versions of the code.