For the world’s leading manufacturers of jet engines, product development remains an extremely costly and time-consuming task. Modern designs have pushed traditional analysis methods to the limit, demanding the use of advanced simulation techniques to better tackle performance and durability issues before committing to hardware. To address these concerns, the Turbine Branch of the United States Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and ADS joined forces to advance one such simulation technique—large scale time accurate simulation—for the U.S. gas turbine industry. The Turbine Branch is responsible for advancing the technical capability of turbo propulsion systems, and ADS provides Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software and analysis services to the world’s manufacturers of jet engines, industrial gas turbines, and compressors.
Time accurate simulation enables designers to understand how time-varying aerodynamic loads can lead to performance loss and structural fatigue. Though this analytical method has long been available, it has largely remained out of reach for commercial design due to its high computational cost and long turnaround time.
To carry out large scale time accurate simulation, hundreds of clustered processors may often be required, necessitating enormous upfront hardware, software and support personnel costs. As a result, this type of simulation has largely remained out of reach to all but the largest of gas turbine manufacturers. Another problem is that time accurate simulation can take weeks to run, rendering it impractical for commercial design cycles.