EXTREME THERMAL

Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne solves your toughest engineering problems.

Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne aerothermal analysts have cutting edge skills and capabilities developed over 50 years of providing solutions to complex engineering problems involving extreme thermal environments in propulsion, power, aerospace, defense and energy markets. A wide variety of state-of-the-art commercial and proprietary computer tools and mature automated analytical processes are available to solve problems in the fields of heat and mass transfer, fluid mechanics and thermodynamics.

Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne Extreme Engineering has access to large compute clusters that can be used to quickly gain comprehensive knowledge of complex thermal systems via automated parallel processing: parametric sensitivities and design space exploration, design optimization and probabilistic analysis. The proven problem solving capabilities of the Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne team can be leveraged to solve many complex thermal and flow challenges.

Extreme thermal environments

• • -460°F, -273°C (absolute zero space sink)
• • -420°F, -251°C (liquid hydrogen fuel)
• • 6000°F, 3115°C (rocket exhaust gas)
• • 10000°F, 5500°C (ionized air during reentry)
• • 100 BTU/in2-s, 1.6x108 W/m2 (rocket combustion chamber heat flux)
• • >1000 suns, 0.6 BTU/in2-s, 1x106 W/m2 (solar power receiver heat flux)

Areas of expertise

• • Extremely high flux heat and mass transfer
• • Thermodynamics of complex systems with supercritical fluids
• • Multi-species fluid mechanics and gas dynamics
• • Thermal radiation exchange in complex articulating geometries
• • Unforgiving space heating and cooling environments with orbital variations
• • Hypersonic and high speed aerodynamics and heating
• • Cooling via endothermic fuels
• • Two-phase flow and heat exchanger design
• • Automation and parallelization of solutions on compute clusters
• • Robust design parametric processing (sensitivities, design scans, optimization, probabilistic analysis)