Integrated Simulation of Solid Propellant Rockets

This paper presents an overview of research activities at the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets (CSAR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. CSAR is one of five university-based research centers funded by the U. S. Department of Energy as part of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). The purpose of ASCI is to advance the state of the art in computational simulation of complex, multicomponent systems and to provide the computational hardware and infrastructure necessary to carry out very large-scale simulations. CSAR is using the solid rocket boosters of the NASA Space Shuttle as the simulation vehicle. Now at the beginning of the fourth year of our ten-year program, the implementation of a fully integrated simulation code is nearly complete and is expected to be finished before the end of 2000. It provides a characterization of various burn scenarios and the onset of potential component failures. Other sub-scale rockets have been simulated to provide verification data for CSAR codes. Refined multiscale component models and advanced system integration concepts based on lessons learned from our current work constitute the key features in the second-generation code targeted for the next few years.