22-10-2012, 04:55 PM
Reducing the Time and Cost of Testing Engines
ABSTRACT
Producing a new aircraft engine currently costs approximately $1 billion, with 3 years of development time for a
commercial engine and 10 years for a military engine. The high development time and cost make it extremely difficult to
transition advanced technologies for cleaner, quieter, and more efficient new engines. To reduce this time and cost, NASA
created a vision for the future where designers would use high-fidelity computer simulations early in the design process in
order to resolve critical design issues before building the expensive engine hardware. To accomplish this vision, NASA’s
Glenn Research Center initiated a collaborative effort with the aerospace industry and academia to develop its Numerical
Propulsion System Simulation (NPSS), an advanced engineering environment for the analysis and design of aerospace
propulsion systems and components. Partners estimate that using NPSS has the potential to dramatically reduce the time,
effort, and expense necessary to design and test jet engines by generating sophisticated computer simulations of an aerospace
object or system. These simulations will permit an engineer to test various design options without having to conduct costly
and time-consuming real-life tests. By accelerating and streamlining the engine system design analysis and test phases, NPSS
facilitates bringing the final product to market faster. NASA’s NPSS Version (V)1.X effort was a task within the Agency s
Computational Aerospace Sciences project of the High Performance Computing and Communication program, which had a
mission to accelerate the availability of high-performance computing hardware and software to the U.S. aerospace community
for its use in design processes. The technology brings value back to NASA by improving methods of analyzing and testing
space transportation components.