Recent CFD research by ASDL and NASA Langley researchers was featured in a “Year in Review” article in the December issue of Aerospace America, the flagship magazine of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). The AIAA Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee mentioned the large-scale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of a human-scale Mars lander, which is the focus of the ongoing research collaboration between Georgia Tech and NASA.

This research was detailed in the paper titled “High-Fidelity Simulations of Human-Scale Mars Lander Descent Trajectories”, which was presented at the 2023 AIAA AVIATION Forum. Researchers simulated the trajectory of a human-scale Mars lander in a time-accurate computational fluid dynamics simulation. The simulation utilized the interface, developed at ASDL, between the Program to Simulate Optimized Trajectories II (POST2) trajectory solver and Fully Unstructured Navier-Stokes (FUN3D) solver to perform the trajectory simulation. This work resulted in simulated flight times of approximately 30 seconds as the vehicle decelerated from Mach 2.4 down to Mach 0.8. These simulations were performed on the Department of Energy’s Summit supercomputer utilizing Nvidia graphical processing units (GPUs).

Click here to read AIAA Fluid Dynamics TC Year in Review Article.