Lichten Runner-up: A Scalable Time-Parallel Solution of Periodic Rotor Dynamics in X3D

A time-parallel algorithm is developed for large-scale three-dimensional rotor dynamic analysis. A modified harmonic balance method with a scalable skyline solver forms the kernel of this algorithm. The algorithm is equipped with a solution procedure suitable for large-scale structures that have lightly damped modes near-resonance. The algorithm is integrated in X3D, implemented on a hybrid- shared and distributed memory architecture, and demonstrated on a three-dimensional structural model of a UH-60A-like fully articulated rotor. Flight test data from UH-60A Airloads Program transition flight C8513 are used for validation. The key conclusion is that the new solver converges to the time-integration solution more than 75 times faster, and achieves a performance of greater than 1 teraFLOPS. The significance of this conclusion is that the principal barrier of computational time for trim solution using high-fidelity three-dimensional structures can be overcome with the scalable harmonic balance method demonstrated in this paper.