Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Weiss, J. M..
An assessment of model uncertainty via probabilistic methods is described. An important question that arises in conceptual design is how accurate do models have to be to be useful? That is to say, when do other uncertainties in higher fidelity model counteract its accuracy when compared to a lower fidelity model faced with these same uncertainties?.
Testing conducted verified that the thruster could indeed be fired with catalyst bed temperatures.
We have implemented preconditioning for multi-species reacting flows in two independent codes, an implicit (ADI) code developed in-house and the RPLUS code (developed at LeRC). The RPLUS code was modified to work on a four-stage Runge-Kutta scheme. The performance of both the codes was tested, and it was shown that preconditioning can improve convergence by a factor of two to a hundred depending on the problem. Our efforts are currently focused on evaluating the effect of chemical sources and on assessing how preconditioning may be applied to improve convergence and robustness in the calculation of reacting flows.
A previous time-derivative preconditioning procedure for solving the Navier-Stokes is extended to the chemical species equations. The scheme is implemented using both the implicit ADI and the explicit Runge-Kutta algorithms. A new definition for time-step is proposed to enable grid-independent convergence. Several examples of both reacting and non-reacting propulsion-related flowfields are considered. In all cases, convergence that is superior to conventional methods is demonstrated. Accuracy is verified using the example of a backward facing step. These results demonstrate that preconditioning can enhance the capability of density-based methods over a wide range of Mach and Reynolds numbers.