Title: Recent research efforts in V&V and UQ at the Stanford ASC Center

Speaker: Gianluca Iaccarino, Stanford University

Date/Time: Thursday, May 10, 2007, 9:00 am – 10:00 am

Location: CSRI Building, Room 90 (Sandia NM)

Brief Abstract:  Despite the considerable success of computer simulation technology in science and engineering, it remains difficult to provide objective confidence measures of the numerical predictions. This difficulty arises from the uncertainties associated with the inputs of any computation attempting to represent a physical system.

In this talk, I will first introduce the Stanford ASC Center and its overarching goal: the high-fidelity simulations of the reactive, multiphase flow through an entire jet engine. These simulations routinely use 1000 CPUs and involve several physical models to represent turbulence, combustion, spray dynamics, heat transfer etc. The assumptions used to derive the models, as well as the complex interactions between them, introduce uncertainty in the overall predictions. The most recent activities in V&V will be presented; these include combined experimental and numerical investigations of turbulent flow separation in the combustion chamber prediffuser and accurate and consistent evaluation of complex equation-of-state for reactive flow calculations.

Finally, we will describe some of the most recent activities at the Center in the area of uncertainty quantification. The first effort aims at combining an adjoint method and the stochastic Galerkin approach to perform UQ on problems with large number of uncertain parameters. The second is an effort to study strongly non-linear problems with discontinuities in probability space.

CSRI POC: Scott Collis, (505) 284-1123