The majority of the Fluid Mechanics methods and tools in use at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne have been developed in-house. Development of specialized through general purpose tools is, itself, one of our specialties and one which we consider a key strength.

Our tools range from spreadsheet-based one-dimensional applications to Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes and optimization systems.

Our CFD specialty areas are:

• Numerical algorithm development for solution of Navier-Stokes and other field equations
• Grid generation and geometry synthesis
• Turbulence model development and application
• Chemical kinetic model development and application
• Large scale parallel computing development, deployment, and application

Any discussion of CFD capability must be accompanied by computing resources. Large CFD jobs can require many months of execution time on a single CPU. The trend in recent years has been to split, or “decompose”, jobs into many pieces to be run in parallel on as many CPUs. At Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, traditional multi-million dollar supercomputers have given way to clusters of ordinary PCs. These clusters offer the highest and most cost effective performance for CFD codes designed and optimized for their use. PC clusters are extremely flexible as they can be rapidly configured and deployed to meet supercomputing needs.

Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne PC Cluster Segment