The US Army Research Laboratory is getting $500,000 and one billion hours of supercomputing time to study the inner workings of internal combustion engines. The award was granted by the Department of Defense’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) Frontier Project, now in its second year. The Army Research Lab will receive $100,000 per year over the next five years as well as one billion hours on the DoD’s fastest supercomputers.
As outlined in an ARL press release, researchers in ARL’s Vehicle Technology Directorate and Iowa State University are investigating two key components of in-cylinder mixtures: spray atomization and liquid-solid spray interactions. The participants will use the DoD supercomputing allocation to carry out high-fidelity modeling with the aim of achieving a quantum leap in engine efficiency.
In internal combustion engines, the fuel and oxidizer combine in a combustion chamber to deliver force to engine components. The fuel-oxidizer mixture determines combustion quality and engine efficiency. Despite being an established technology, the turbulent spray atomization process remains an outstanding problem in multi-phase flows, according to Dr. Luis Bravo, the principal investigator in ARL’s Frontier project.
“This has been hindered in part by the well-known inaccessibility of the near nozzle optically thick region,” states Bravo, an Army mechanical engineer specializing in computational and thermal sciences. “As a result, coarse models and approximations have been used to simulate spray breakup which do not correctly represent the physics. Direct numerical simulations, as proposed in this work, are aimed at studying the fundamental mechanisms in regions where experimental access and analysis is difficult.”
“For calculations to be extremely precise requires access to massively parallel computing platforms with millions of hours of computing time,” adds Bravo.
“State-of-the-art high fidelity simulations carry a significant computational overhead arising from the large-scale physical disparities in turbulent atomizing flows. This approach will accelerate the development of next-generation internal combustion engines for aerial and ground combat vehicle applications and will feature significant increases in fuel economy and power densities.”
The objective of the Frontier program is to enable the exploration of science and technology outcomes that would not be achievable using typically-available HPCMP resources. Submissions are evaluated as to whether they represent a potential significant contribution to the scientific and engineering community and their requirements for HPC computational time and resources.