Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Computational Fluid Dynamics at SpaceX

#1
Yazata Offline
The engineers at NSF were discussing Starship and one remarked about how amazingly well the aerodynamics of Sn8 worked the very first time it was flown for real. And he posted this video of a talk that a couple of SpaceX engineers delivered at Nvidia, a Santa Clara California manufacturer of graphics processing units (GPUs) used by Hollywood for visual effects, by the video game industry (both of which use very cutting edge computer science)... and by SpaceX for computational fluid dynamics modeling of the aerodynamics of space vehicles and combustion processes inside rocket engines like Raptor.

It isn't simple. Things are happening very fast at all scales (many of these flows are fractals) and the demands that they place on computer memory and processing power are immense. So data compression and efficiencies in memory allocation are vital if computations are to capture all the necessary detail and not take a year to complete.

Some discussion of how they manage that. Familiar old Fourier analysis which can be very inefficient with non-periodic waves and only becomes managable by more coarse samples that lower the fidelity and lose important data (examples from MP3 players) and how they attack the problem at SpaceX with wavelet sampling thats allow them to use a relatively simple algorithm to apply processing power to where in the sample space interesting things are happening. There's also some cool videos of their computer models of combustion in closed containers (like rocket engine combustion chambers) and shock waves around Dragon capsules during reentry.

Presumably this is how they modeled the airflow around Starship, designed its unorthodox skydiver control flaps (elonerons) and had some idea of what they expected it to do before Sn8 ever flew. Given its stability during its flight, it looks like they got it right, for the subsonic flight regime at least.


https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/txk-VO1hzBY

nN
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Which computational universe do we live in? C C 0 51 Apr 18, 2022 05:56 PM
Last Post: C C
  New Boston Dynamics Robot "Handle" 2017 Secular Sanity 2 458 Feb 3, 2017 05:37 PM
Last Post: Secular Sanity
  What Computational Physics Is Really About C C 0 441 Nov 10, 2015 11:19 PM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)