PARALLEL UNSTEADY TURBOPUMP SIMULATIONS FOR LIQUID ROCKET ENGINES

Abstract

This paper reports the progress being made towards complete turbo-pump simulation capability for liquid rocket engines. The Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) turbo-pump impeller is used as a test case for the performance evaluation of the MPI, hybrid MPI/Open-MP, and MLP versions of the INS3D code. Then, a computational model of a turbo-pump has been developed for the shuttle upgrade program. Relative motion of the grid system for rotor-stator interaction was obtained by employing overset grid techniques. Unsteady computations for SSME turbo-pump, which contains 101 zones with 31 Million grid points, are carried on Origin 2000 systems at NASA Ames Research Center. The approach taken for these simulations, and the performance of the parallel versions of the code are presented.