Parallel 3D Numerical Simulation of Continuous Detonation Engine on Graphics Processing Units

Abstract

Continuous Detonation Engine is a new concept of a supersonic combustion engine for aerospace. 3D numerical simulation of this engine determines the chemical combustion process and kinetic properties of reactive flow within the combustion chamber. To capture the Chapman-Jouguet detonation phenomenon, the grid size needs to be small than 250. The utilization of this fine grid requires a significant amount of computation workload to depict this combustion. With the help of NVIDIA's CUDA, the computation is discretized and distributed to multiple graphics processing units, which makes the computation time to be reasonable and tolerable. This paper introduces the architecture of NVIDIA's Tesla C1060 card and CUDA, showing the way to map our model into a CUDA programming and the performance of acceleration. It explicates the details of the movement within the engine. The result justifies that continuous detonation engine is a prominent propeller which releases massive impulse. Some problems of CUDA programming and future plan will also be discussed.