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Kevin W. Dickens

Publications and source records attributed to Kevin W. Dickens.

Filtration of Spaceflight Propulsion and Pressurant Systems

NASA has provided little guidance for determining and implementing appropriate filtration of spaceflight propulsion and pressurant systems. Additionally, industry standards typically used for building and verifying filter performance are antiquated and lack applicability to propulsion systems. The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) was requested to perform a gap analysis, identify risks, and develop a mitigation plan for spaceflight propulsion filtration. This report contains the outcome of the NESC analysis.

Propulsion System↗

CEA2022: A Modernization of NASA Glenn’s Software CEA (Chemical Equilibrium with Applications)

The software program “Chemical Equilibrium with Applications” (CEA) is used to solve chemical equilibrium, and compute thermodynamic and transport properties of the resulting mixture, and also has special solvers dedicated to rocket, shock, and detonation problems. We have recently completed a full re-write of CEA with modernization and improvements, called “CEA2022”. In this paper, we will give an overview of CEA2022’s features, and discuss some of the fundamental equations used by CEA2022, as well as the fundamental assumptions, in order to provide users with a complete understanding of the software’s methodology. Several enhancements have been made to the software, including modern software development practices, interface improvements, and additional features. The feature enhancements include: running cases in parallel with thread safe solves, thermodynamic and transport database updates, and allowing for negative and inert reactants. In terms of interface improvements, we have made CEA a reusable library by adding APIs for multiple languages, including Python, Matlab, Excel, Fortran, and C. The subroutine interface allows for integration with other applications, including flow-solver integration (i.e. with CFD). We also compare results between CEA2022 and the previous version (CEA2) as a validation of the new software.

chemical equilibrium↗