The Development of an Intelligent Interface to a Computational Fluid Dynamics Flow-solver Code

Researchers at the NASA Lewis Research Center are currently developing an "intelligent" interface to aid in the development and use of large, computational fluid dynamics flow-solver codes for studying the internal fluid behavior of aerospace propulsion systems. This paper discusses the requirements, design, and implementation of an intelligent interface to Proteus, a general purpose, 3-dimensional, Navier-Stokes flow solver. The interface is called PROTAIS to denote its introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) concepts to the Proteus code. INTRODUCTION Throughout the aeropropulsion community, researchers are striving to develop computer codes that will be able to compute the complex 3-dimensional fluid behavior internal to aerospace propulsion systems (refs. 1-4). The availability of such codes will enable the rapid assessment of new designs, significantly reducing the time, cost, and risk of developing future propulsion systems. Typically, new computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes are written for specific applications and evolve through many revisions and updates. Major revisions are usually required if a code is to be used for a different class of flow problems. Often, revising a code is extremely difficult because of poor documentation and a lack of a modular program structure. The result is that many CFD codes are not widely used. Thus, there is a great deal of "reinventing the