INTELLIGENT LIGHT™ has collaborated with a major engine manufacturer in Germany in a joint research project funded by the DLR to advance computational simulation capabilities for complete aero engines. Kombyne was called upon for two aspects of this effort, in transit post-processing within the company’s Hydra, an internally developed CFD solver used by Rolls Royce, and steering of the code during runtime.
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Rolls Royce Deutschland engineer, Marcus Meyer Ph.D., presented a landmark paper at AIAA SciTech 2022 (January, San Diego, CA). In it, Dr. Meyer described the use of “Computational Steering,” where the Rolls-Royce flow solver Hydra was instrumented with the Kombyne™ software to enable on-the-fly changes of the computational setup for creating compressor maps. The paper is available here: https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2022-1723.
According to Dr. Meyer’s paper, compared to conventional CFD techniques, the steering approach “removes the need to submit separate jobs for each operating point and treats the CFD simulation like a virtual experiment where operating conditions can be changed while the virtual engine is running. File I/O and initialization happens only once, rather than repeated for different jobs.”
The steering of a simulation, applied to solvers running on high-performance computing (HPC) platforms, increases overall efficiency. According to Steve Legensky, President & CTO of Intelligent Light (and co-author of the AIAA paper), “Getting many results in less time saves money as well as the valuable time of engineers. When Kombyne™ is integrated into a solver code, the simulation can be treated more like a flight test or wind tunnel ensemble.”
Interested parties should download Kombyne™ Lite directly at kombyne.net. Installation is extremely easy for Kombyne™ using prebuilt modules for OVERFLOW2, Hydra, PyFR, OpenFOAM, and more every day. For other solvers or inhouse solvers, a small adapter is used to link Kombyne™ into the solver. Kombyne™ provides native APIs in FORTRAN, C/C++ and python, and is scalable via MPI. In batch operation, a simple parameter datafile sets up the functions to be performed during simulation.
About Kombyne™ – Kombyne™ comes in two flavors: Kombyne™ and Kombyne™ Lite. The price of a site subscription ranges from free (Kombyne™ Lite) to ($25K – $180K) per year for Kombyne™ depending on site size. Kombyne™ is delivered as enterprise open source and both Kombyne™ and Kombyne™ Lite are licensed with no limit in the number of runtime instances. Availability: Kombyne™ Lite – immediate download (kombyne.net), Kombyne™ – contact Intelligent Light™.
About Intelligent Light™ – Founded in 1984, Intelligent Light™ developed FieldView which became one of the world’s leading software tools for visualization and post-processing of CFD. In October 2019, Intelligent Light™ decided to spin off FieldView into an entity focused on the packaged software business (FieldView CFD, Inc.) which now allows Intelligent Light™ to focus on subscription based HPC and digital twin products. The company also participates in contracted R&D efforts. Development of VisIt Prime™ and Kombyne™ was supported by the US Department of Energy via grants DE-SC0007548 and DE-SC0018633, respectively.