So has gone the mantra of aircraft engine manufacturers since the days of the Wright Brothers. Redesign and model. Build and test. The center will give 60 Stanford faculty members and 30 doctoral students from a range of disciplines access to the world's fastest supercomputers, machines about 100 times more powerful than those currently available to campus researchers. The Stanford researchers under the direction of William C. Reynolds, the Donald W. Whittier Professor of Mechanical Engineering will use this enormous computer power to create the most detailed scientific simulations that have ever been made of the complex airflows that travel through the guts of a turbofan engine of the sort that propels today's commercial jetliners.
New improvements come very hard, but they are still crucial.
High-performance computer simulations of the sort that the new center will develop should make meeting these goals easier and less expensive. Not only should this approach reduce the cost of making incremental improvements in engine design, it also should make it much easier for engine designers to explore riskier, more radical design concepts. The use of computers for virtual prototyping, designing things by computer rather than by building and testing, is something that I have been emphasizing since I became dean. He spoke at a news conference held in Washington, D.C., on July 31, to announce the Department of Energy's new program. Ninety percent of the supercomputers' time will be devoted to a highly classified effort to develop computer simulations of the nation's nuclear weapons that are accurate enough to replace underground nuclear testing as a means for judging the reliability and effectiveness of the nation's nuclear stockpile.