An electrically driven propellant pump (HALE E-Pump) was analysed and tested to determine its viability for use in a bi-propellant launch vehicle for the High-Altitude Liquid Engine (HALE) student rocket team at Oregon State University (OSU). The pump, manufactured in 2022 by students in OSU machine shops, was hydrostatically tested...
Vacuum arc remelting (VAR) is a secondary melting process for exotic alloys. The main purpose of this process is to increase the input ingot’s physical and chemical homogeneity. This is accomplished through the application of a high current that melts the material through the emergence of electrical arcs that induce...
Modern scientific and engineering problems often require simulations with a level of resolution difficult to achieve in reasonable amounts of time—even in effectively parallelized programs. Therefore, applications that exploit high performance computing (HPC) systems have become invaluable in academia and industry over the past two decades. Addressing the questions that...
Simulations of combustion and reacting flows often encounter stiffness in the equations governing chemical kinetics. Explicit solvers for these ordinary differential equations offer low computational expense, but typically cannot efficiently handle stiff systems. In contrast, implicit methods demand greater expense but offer unconditional stability—as a result, most reactive-flow solvers rely...
Real transportation fuels contain a wide range of hydrocarbon species, and this complexity poses challenges for modeling. Surrogates with a simpler blend of hydrocarbon reference fuels can approximate the physical and chemical characteristics of real fuels and enable practical simulation of the reacting flows that occur in engines and combustors....
Engineering applications often require fast, accurate solutions of fluid flow around freely moving bodies. The massive parallelism enabled by graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture enables high performance, offering a promising alternative to traditional solver acceleration via multicore central processing units (CPU). However, fully harnessing GPU parallelism requires specialized algorithms and...
Modeling elementary chemical reactions in ocean fluid dynamics simulations requires significant computing resources, which can be diminished with model reduction techniques. Submesoscale ocean turbulence and biogeochemical reactions in the ocean occur on approximately the same time scale, 105 seconds. This similarity in time scales indicates a strong coupling between these...
Smoldering combustion in wildland fires is a critical phenomenon that needs in-depth study because it can initiate with weaker ignition sources, can persist for long periods, is difficult to suppress, and can transit to flaming combustion. Cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin are the major organic constituents within biomass, in varying proportions...
Implementing multicomponent diffusion in numerical combustion studies is computationally expensive due to the challenges involved in computing diffusion coefficients. As a result, mixture-averaged diffusion treatments or simpler methods are used to avoid these costs. However, the accuracy and appropriateness of the mixture-averaged diffusion model has not been verified for three-dimensional...
Accurately modeling the chemistry of conventional and alternative liquid transportation fuels in combustion technology is vital to predicting important quantities such as the burning rate, heat release, and pollutant emissions. However, incorporating detailed chemical kinetic models into reactive-flow simulations poses a significant challenge due to the associated high computational expense...
