ESA Open Invitation to Tender: 1-10741
Open Date: 09/09/2021 10:27 CEST
Closing Date: 04/11/2021 13:00 CEST

SPIS is widely used for surfaces charging analyses, including the effects of electrical propulsion, dust andplasma instruments simulation. In its current state, the software numerical performances are reasonable onbasic application scenarios. With the increase of electrical thrusters performances and power consumption, in multiple configurations such as MSR (Mars Sample Return)/ERO (Earth Return Orbiter), surface charging, contamination and erosion effects are amplified, making them even more important in the spacecraftdevelopment process. Meanwhile the simulation complexity requires very fine meshing in the larger thruster plume as well as a highernumberof numerical particles in order to keep a proper statistics on erosion and contamination on surfaces. On the lunar surface,dusty plasma simulations are required for the simulation of regolith charging, transport and interactions with surface systems. This charged dust are a known engineering and health challenge since the Apollo missions. The current capabilities of SPIS make it difficult to address charging scenarios combining large timescales (illumination variation), large structures domains (e.g. Moon base) andmoving assets (rovers, astronauts, etc.). For these future exploration applications, the present version of SPIS requires simulation times exceeding weeks even on machines with hundreds of cores. This activity aims at re-coding core elements of SPIS to produce a numerically optimized and fully parallelized code, drastically reducing simulation time for computationally demanding scenarios. Improvements on simulation time are expected to directly impact the development times of spacecraft as wellas innovative surface coatings and materials mitigating charging, erosion and dust collection. The activity encompasses the following tasks:- Review the stateof the art mathematical and numerical approaches for parallelized Vlasov-Poisson systemsolvers,- Review the state of the art technologies and numerical techniques of High Performance Computing,- Select and implement a high performance solution to improve thecurrent SPIS solver,- Benchmark the high performance solver and test the performances improvements using well defined testcases,- Test and Validate the high performance code on typical demanding application cases.Footnote: Procurement Policy: C(1) = Activity restricted to non-prime contractors (incl. SMEs). For additional information please go to EMITS news „Industrial Policy measures for non-primes, SMEs and RD entities in ESA programmes”.

Estabilishment: ESTEC
ECOS Required: No
Classified: No
Price Range: > 500 KEURO
Authorised Contact Person: Christophe Rene R. Seynaeve
Initiating Service: TEC-EPS
IP Measure: C1
Prog. Reference: E/0901-01 – Technology Developme
Tender Type: Open Competition
Open To Tenderers From: AT+BE+CH+CZ+DE+DK+EE+EL+ES+FI+FR+GB+HU+IE+IT+LU+NL+NO+PL+PT+RO+SE
Technology Keywords: 4-B-I-Effects Analysis Tools
Products Keywords: 2-M-3-a-Radiation belts, Solar energetic particles, Galactic cosmic rays,…