Outstanding Achievement Award

By making CFD tools more robust while also improving the accuracy and providing physical insight to the user, the UPMS can increase the viability of CFD as a useful design tool. Major industries that use CFD codes include aerospace, automotive, bio-medical, electronics packaging, manufacturing, and civil engineering. Computational efficiency is key in producing quality CFD results quickly enough to be of use to design engineers. Often, inexperienced users unknowingly pose grossly inefficient problems due to poor grid design and/or algorithm setup. The value of an expert UPMS is that its detailed interface allows novice users to quickly gain experience in properly posed CFD analysis, while under minimal supervision.

Codes such as PAB3D, CFL3D, TLNS3D, Vulcan, Overflow and others are some of the CFD codes developed under funds and support from NASA centers. Most of the users of a particular CFD code express the need to use another NASA’s CFD code for comparisons or validations process. Because of the time involved in learning and setup of the input files, another CFD code may not be utilized even if it has the right options for simulating the particular problem. With the development of the Unified Process Management System we will accomplish the following:

• Allow engineers to use several of NASA CFD publicly available codes.
• Speed up the technology transfer of NASA CFD code to the public, as they become easier to use.
• Reduce the technical support for each code as users can utilize the online help provided by the expert system.
• A universal case file can be used to generate input files for any particular CFD code. The case file can be stored for later use or sent to another organization or group to simulate the same problem using another CFD code.
• Build a library of standard test cases. The input library can provide the user with direct access to a large and growing database of input codes.
• Can be used as demonstration or teaching examples or as starting point for the novice.

Experts may also benefit by the ability to quickly switch between different CFD codes to obtain the best fit for the flow regime under consideration, thus minimizing design cost.

The design for the UPMS concentrates on creating an easily expandable and maintainable program. We anticipate that many new features will be desirable in the future. Some of the interfaces may be such that their form, function, or interfaces cannot be guessed. Consequently, we have emphasized modular interfaces and flexible architecture

UPMS Consultants

Dr. Abdol-Hamid

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UPMS Documentation (MS word),(PDF)

 UPMS Tutorial

Requests for Software

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