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Numerical Simulations For The Flow Of Rocket Exhaust Through A Granular Medium

Physical lab experiments have shown that the pressure caused by an impinging jet on a granular bed has the potential to form craters. This poses a danger to landing success and nearby spacecraft for future rocket missions. Current numerical simulations for this process do not accurately reproduce experimental results. Our goal is to produce improved simulations to more accurately and effi- ciently model the changes in pressure as gas flows through a porous medium. A two-dimensional model in space known as the nonlinear Porous Medium Equation as it is derived from Darcy’s law is used. An Alternating-Direction Implicit (ADI) temporal scheme is presented and implemented which reduces our multidimensional problem into a series of one-dimensional problems. We take advantage of explicit approximations for the nonlinear terms using extrapolation formulas derived from Taylor-series, which increases efficiency when compared to other common methods. We couple our ADI temporal scheme with different spatial discretizations including a second-order Finite Difference (FD) method, a fourth-order Orthogonal Spline Collocation (OSC) method, and an Nth-order Chebyshev Spectral method. Accuracy and runtime are compared among the three methods for comparison in a linear analogue of our problem. We see the best results for accuracy when using an ADI-Spectral method in the linear case, but discuss possibilities for increased effi- ciency using an ADI-OSC scheme. Nonlinear results are presented using the ADI-Spectral method and the ADI-FD method.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-3940
Date01 January 2013
CreatorsKraakmo, Kristina
PublisherUniversity of Central Florida
Source SetsUniversity of Central Florida
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceElectronic Theses and Dissertations

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