Solid rocket motor propellant grain burnback simulation based on fast minimum distance function calculation and improved marching tetrahedron method
Pengfei Ren, Hongbo Wang, Guofeng Zhou, Jiani Li, Qiang Cai, Jia-quan Yu, Ya Yuan
Abstract
To efficiently compute arbitrary propellant grain evolution of the burning surface with uniform and non-uniform burning rate for solid rocket motor, a unified framework of burning surface regression simulation has been developed based on minimum distance function. In order to speed up the computation of the mini-mum distance between grid nodes of grain and the triangular mesh of burning surface, a fast distance querying method based on the equal size cube voxel structure was employed. An improved marching tetrahedron method based on piecewise linear approximation was carried out on second-order tetrahedral elements, achieved high-efficiency and adequate accuracy of burning surface extraction simultaneously. The cases of star grain, finocyl grain, and non-uniform tube grain were studied to verify the proposed method. The observed result indicates that the grain burnback computation method could realize the accurate simulation on unstructured tetrahedral mesh with a desirable performance on computational time.