The development of scramjet engines is an important research area for advancing hypersonic and orbital flights. Progress toward optimal engine designs requires accurate flow simulations together with uncertainty quantification. However, performing uncertainty quantification for scramjet simulations is challenging due to the large number of uncertainparameters involvedandthe high computational costofflow simulations. These difficulties are addressedin this paper by developing practical uncertainty quantification algorithms and computational methods, and deploying themin the current studyto large-eddy simulations ofajet incrossflow inside a simplified HIFiRE Direct Connect Rig scramjet combustor. First, global sensitivity analysis is conducted to identify influential uncertain input parameters, which can help reduce the system's stochastic dimension. Second, because models of different fidelity are used in the overall uncertainty quantification assessment, a framework for quantifying and propagating the uncertainty due to model error is presented. These methods are demonstrated on a nonreacting jet-in-crossflow test problem in a simplified scramjet geometry, with parameter space up to 24 dimensions, using static and dynamic treatments of the turbulence subgrid model, and with two-dimensional and three-dimensional geometries.
The accurate evaluation of the performance of complex engineering devices needs to rely on high-fidelity numerical simulations and the systematic characterization and propagation of uncertainties. Several sources of uncertainty may impact the performance of an engineering device through operative conditions, manufacturing tolerances, and even physical models. In the presence of multiphysics systems the number of the uncertain parameters can be fairly large and their propagation through the numerical codes still remains prohibitive because the overall computational budget often allows for only an handful of such high-fidelity realizations. On the other side, common engineering practice can take advantage from a solid history of development and assessment of so called low-fidelity models which albeit less accurate are often capable to at least capture overall trends and parameter dependencies of the system. In this contribution we address the forward propagation of uncertainty parameters relying on statistical estimators built on sequences of numerical and physical discretizations which are provably convergent to the high-fidelity statistics, while exploiting low-fidelity computational models to increase the reliability and confidence in the numerical predictions. The performances of the approaches are presented by means of two fairly complicated aerospace problems, namely the aero-thermo-structural analysis of a turbofan engine nozzle and a flow through a scramjet-like device.