Under the authority of the Federal
Technology Transfer Act (FTTA) of 1986, CAPT Bruce W. Buckley,
USN, Commanding Officer of the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL),
and Mr. Paul Shattuck, of the Missiles and Space Advanced Technology
Center of Lockheed Martin Corporation (LMMS), have signed a Cooperative
Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) focused on the simulation
and visualization of surface-ship missile-blast and ship structural
response dynamics to support the DARPA Simulation Based Design
(SBD) Program. The signing took place in January 1997 at NRL.
The FTTA provides for making
federal laboratories' developments accessible to private industry,
and to state and local governments, and for the improvement of
economic, environmental and social well-being of the United States,
by stimulating the civil utilization of federally funded technology
developments.
According to Mr. Gary Jones,
the Program Manager of the SBD Program at DARPA, "The
Simulation-Based
Design (SBD) Program is developing and testing a prototype digital-
knowledge environment for representing physical, mechanical,
and operational characteristics of a complex system, which will
transition to the military services. This interactive collaborative
environment will enable the Department of Defense to more efficiently
design, analyze, manufacture, operate, test, and support products
as systems of systems. SBD will serve as a key technology enabler
for acquisition process reform."
The objective of the NRL effort,
led by Dr. William C. Sandberg of the Laboratory for Computational
Physics and Fluid Dynamics, is to demonstrate to DARPA that
high-performance,
scalable, computations can be carried out for rapid survivability
assessment and structural configuration iteration within a distributed,
collaborative design environment. The NRL team, and George Mason
University and SAIC researchers, plan to show that a scalable,
unsteady blast-code running on the NRL Origin 2000 parallel computer,
is capable of coupling high-performance computations into a real-time
environment for distributed simulation. The code being demonstrated,
FEFLO97, is also one of the codes chosen by the DoD High Performance
Computing Modernization Program for its Scalable Software
Initiative.
To successfully operate in the
real-time design environment, the code must be coupled into a
Run-Time Infrastructure (RTI) which is consistent with the Defense
Modelling and Simulation Office (DMSO) High Level Architecture
(HLA) and respond to notification from a combat simulator that
a missile hit has occurred at a particular location at which
a computation is desired. The SGI Origin 2000 will issue a request
to retrieve the appropriate files from the Newport News Shipbuilding
Corporation Smart Product Model. The retrieved files, which are
Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) representations of
the affected ship spaces, must be translated and interrogated
to create computational grids for the blast and structure computations.
Coupled blast and structural dynamics computations will then
be carried out, the data visualized and analyzed, and the location
of the data files broadcast to other design federates, including
Electric Boat Corporation, for coupling into their fire, smoke,
and VR firefighting simulations.
The accurate modeling of the
complex dynamics of shock propagation through several ship spaces,
which include open hatches and large obstacles; the time history
of the pressure on all decks and bulkheads in the spaces; and
the coupled structural dynamics are critical to assessing the
suitability of a given ship space design configuration from a
survivability standpoint, and as such, will have immediate practical
value to the Navy. The rapid, iterative visualization of the
time varying blast loads on all surfaces and objects and the
structural responses for alternative configurations within a
distributed collaborative environment should be of value to ship
designers, and hence accelerate the transition of the DARPA Simulation
Based Design technology into the Navy design and acquisition
community.
The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory is the Navy's full-spectrum corporate laboratory, conducting a broadly based multidisciplinary program of scientific research and advanced technological development. The Laboratory, with a total complement of nearly 2,500 personnel, is located in southwest Washington, D.C., with other major sites at the Stennis Space Center, Miss., and Monterey, Calif. NRL has served the Navy and the nation for over 85 years and continues to meet the complex technological challenges of today's world. For more information, visit the NRL homepage or join the conversation on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
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