Uncertainty quantification for high-fidelity CFD and scramjet operability estimation.

What is it about?

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology plays a strong role in the design and development of aerospace and defense vehicles such as high-speed applications where testing under the correct operational conditions is not yet viable. Despite decades of research towards making CFD predictive and reliable, it has not proven so due to the significant uncertainties in physical models, initial/boundary conditions, computational mesh, numerical schemes and methods. The technical work summarized in this abstract has been aimed to directly address these issues by integrating dimensionally adaptive sparse grid uncertainty quantification (UQ) method with an existing reacting CFD solver called VULCAN, developed by NASA Langley Research Center and demonstration of this coupled framework on understanding of operability limits of dual-mode scramjet isolator.

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Why is it important?

This method provides a way to identify what causes CFD results to be not predictive.