Computer software designed at Mississippi State is being used to help NASA design future spacecraft.
The team working on the software involves the contributions of the computer science department, the College of Engineering and the Engineering Research Center.
Computer science and engineering professor Ed Luke leads the team.
Luke said two main pieces of software have been developed by the team-Logic Programming for Parallel Computational Field Simulations, and Computational Combustion Modeling.
“One, LOCI, is a system for creating simulation software and the other, CHEM, is a piece of simulation software that deals with the extreme pressures and temperatures of combustion rocket engines,” Luke said.
Accurate simulation software can approximate unobtainable data, allowing more extensive research and design modification, Luke said.
“Sometimes it is impossible to get a detailed measurement of severe conditions such as high temperature or pressure, but the software can measure conditions further away from the severe areas and infer the data for the area that cannot be measured,” Luke said.
The research is funded by grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation, Luke said.
“Less than a year ago we finished up an $800,000 grant to build specific simulations,” Luke said. “We have about $400,000 in grants for the current projects.”
The SimCenter is a branch of the ERC that develops simulation software for mechanical systems, David Marcum, director of the SimCenter, said.
“We’re involved in computational simulations primarily with engineering systems such as cars, planes, rockets, missiles, etc., mainly in the field of aerodynamics,” Marcum said.
The simulation software offers verification and validation in that it determines whether the correct sets of equations are being used to produce the model, Luke said.
“The software allows you to test whether what you are doing is consistent with the mathematical model and whether your model is consistent with the physical world,” Luke said.
The software produced by the team has already received approval from NASA, said Pasquale Cinnella, professor of aerospace engineering.
“NASA Marshall is telling us that our current version of the software is already producing results better than those produced by any current commercially produced software,” Cinnella said.
The software for producing simulations has also received approval from other university research centers and is currently being used to produce new simulation software, Luke said.
“Several other universities are using the system we developed. Florida State and Cornell are two of the universities using LOCI,” Luke said.