NUMERICAL TOOLS FOR THREE DIMENSIONAL SIMULATIONS OF THE ROTATING DETONATION ENGINE IN COMPLEX GEOMETRIES

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a computational code REFLOPS USG (REactive FLOw solver for Propulsion Systems on UnStructured Grids) based on the Favre averaged Navier-Stokes equations with chemical reactions for semi-ideal multicomponent gas to predict the structure and dynamics of three-dimensional unsteady detonation as it occurs in the Rotating Detonation Engine (RDE). This work provides an overview of second order accurate in time and space finite volume method applied to conservation equations and its implementation on unstructured self-adaptive tetrahedral or hexahedral three-dimensional cell-centred meshes. The inviscid fluxes are given by the Riemann solver and stabilization is ensured by the proper limiters inherited from the TVD theory or gradient based limiters. The stiff equations of chemical kinetics are solved by use of implicit DVODE (Double precision Variablecoefficient Ordinary Differential Equation solver, with fixed-leading-coefficient implementation) routine or by explicit Chemeq2 routine. Additional improvements are incorporated into the code such as parallelization in OpenMP and implementation of NVIDIA CUDA technology. REFLOPS USG has become a fundamental numerical tool in the research of RDE at the Institute of Aviation in Warsaw, in frame of Innovative Economy project UDA-POIG.01.03.01-14-071 ‘Turbine engine with detonation combustion chamber’ supported by EU and Ministry of Regional Development, Poland. The simulations presented in this paper are based on inviscid or viscous multicomponent semi-ideal gas flow with chemical reactions. Due to high computational costs only simple chemical reaction mechanisms are used here.