Solid rocket motor propellant grain burnback simulation based on fast minimum distance function calculation and improved marching tetrahedron method

To efficiently compute arbitrary propellant grain evolution of the burning surface with uniform and non-uniform burning rate for solid rocket motor, a unified framework of burning sur-face regression simulation has been developed based on minimum distance function. In order to speed up the computation of the mini-mum distance between grid nodes of grain and the triangular mesh of burning surface, a fast distance querying method based on the equal size cube voxel struc-ture was employed. An improved marching tetrahedron method based on piecewise linear approx-imation was carried out on second-order tetrahedral elements, achieved high-efficiency and adequate accuracy of burning surface extraction simultaneously. The cases of star grain, finocyl grain, and non-uniform tube grain were studied to verify the proposed method. The observed result indicates that the grain burnback computation method could realize the accurate simulation on unstructured tetrahedral mesh with a desirable performance on computational time. ? 2020 Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).