Description: Plume-regolith interaction during propulsive landing results in (1) the liberation of dust/debris particles that may collide and strike the landing vehicle and surrounding assets obscuring ground observation for safe landing and (2) craters that are formed on the landing surface, posing additional challenges to vehicle stability and surface operations. The Gas-Granular Flow Solver (Loci/GGFS) has been developed for simulating the multi-phase gas-particle interaction and transport simulations for the complex regolith compositions found on Moon and Mars. Eulerian-Eulerian models are applied to model gas and particle phases as continuum fluids, providing an efficient and accurate path for simulating large-scale problems. The prototype tool has been successfully applied in support of multiple lander applications at NASA, during which the need for computational speed-up of the tool was identified as necessary to timely support lander applications. This project is aimed at enhancing performance of the simulation tool by making use of GPGPU architectures in a cost-effective manner. The most computationally-intensive portions of the solver have been identified and enhancements will be performed to offload

Benefits: NASA commercial applications include plume-surface interaction effects analysis to support Lunar and Mars lander projects. Human class Mars lander plume-surface interaction has been identified as high risk by the Entry, Descent, Landing and Ascent (EDL&A) systems integration teams. Lunar lander customers range from small commercial landers under the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program, follow-on mid-size landers, to the now high priority Human Lander System (HLS).

.Potential non-NASA applications include a wide range of sand/dust related military and civilian applications such as rotorcraft brownout and engine dust ingestion. In addition, multiphase flows occur in many applications in chemical, petro-chemical and fossil-energy conversion industries where accurate modeling of particle shape play a huge role in the flow behavior of real particulate systems.