For the Fourth of July, let me share some of […]

For the Fourth of July, let me share some of the magic of the rocket’s red glare… the custom fractal wavelet CFD package that SpaceX developed for combustion simulation.

When developing the big F-1 engines for the Saturn V, combustion instability was tackled with trial and error variants on injector designs and ultimately they gave up on finding a stable design, and instead throttled back a bit whenever pogo sticking was detected. Today, we can simulate what took many hard engineering trials.

Here is a summary of the incredible computational complexity made manageable: https://www.nextplatform.com/2015/03/27/rockets-shake-and-rattle-so-spacex-rolls-homegrown-cfd/