PARALLEL CFD SIMULATIONS OF PROJECTILE FLOW FIELDS WITH MICROJETS

As part of a Department of Defense Grand Challenge Project, advanced high performance computing (HPC) time-accurate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques have been developed and applied to a new area of aerodynamic research on microjets for control of small and medium caliber projectiles. This paper describes a computational study undertaken to determine the aerodynamic effect of flow control in the afterbody regions of spin-stabilyzed projectiles at subsonic and low transonic speeds using an advanced scalable unstructured flow solver in various parallel computers such as the IBM SP4 and Linux Cluster. High efficiency is achieved for both steady and time-accurate unsteady flow field simulations using advanced scalable Navier-Stokes computational techniques. Results relating to the code's portability and its performance on the Linux clusters are also addressed. Numerical simulations with the unsteady microjets show the jets to substantially alter the flow field both near the jet and the base region of the projectile that in turn affects the forces and moments even at zero degree angle of attack. The results have shown the potential of HPC CFD simulations on parallel machines to provide to provide insight into the jet interaction flow fields leading to improve designs.