The KIVA Story a Paradigm of Technology Transfer

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    190 IEEE TRANSACITONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, VOL. 36, NO. 4, DECEMBER 1993

    The KIVA Story: A Paradigm of Technology TransferDorothy Comer Amsden and Anthony A. Amsden

    Abstract- This paper discusses a case history of technologytransfer from a government laboratory to industry, to otherlaboratories, and to universities. The technology transferred isa computer program named KIVA that simulates air flow, fuelsprays, and combustion in practical combustion devices suchas automobile and truck engines, gas turbines that power jetaircraft, and industrial furnaces, heaters, and waste incinerators.The success of the transfer process derives not from presentinga finished product, but rather from working closely with KIVAusers at every stage of development. By making the originalsource code available to a broad user community, a second avenueof transfer occurs as university engineering departments preparestudents to enter industry.

    INTRODUCTIONOMBUSTION is a major process affecting our lives, andC t provides over 90% of our useful energy. Unfortunately,combustion is also the main source of environmental pollution.Improving combustion processes is therefore of paramountimportance for reducing both fuel consumption and emissions.The processes involved in combustion are extraordinarilycomplex, the parameters numerous. Designers of modemcombustion systems have come to realize that experimentalapproaches alone are simply too difficult and expensive to ac-count for the multitude of parameters involved that are neededto accurately predict the performance of combustion systems.Another approach was needed to supplement experimentation.Recent rapid advances in high-performance computing havemade it a viable alternative to empirical design. The advancesin computing power, coupled with improved numerical algo-

    rithms and advanced experimental diagnostic techniques, makeit possible to simulate complex combustion processes, and toverify the quality of the simulation experimentally where dataare available. The goal is to develop more efficient and cleaner-burning combustion devices that can be brought to marketquickly and at low development cost.In this context, the DOE funded a combustion researchprogram that led to the development of WA, a computerprogram that simulates air flow, fuel sprays, and combustion inpractical combustion devices. Over the past decade, a sequenceof three-dimensional simulation codes were developed at LosAlamos National Laboratory; originally they were intended formodeling flows in gasoline and diesel engines. These codesdraw on the computational fluid dynamics(0)xpertise atLosAlamos developed over the years for modeling high-speed

    flows that occur in detonation processes. KIVA' features theability to calculate air flows in complex geometries with fuel-spray dynamics and evaporation, mixing of fuel and air, andcombustion with resultant heat release and exhaust-productformation. Because of its broad range of features, KIVAhas been applied to many combustion devices in addition tointernal combustion engines, such as gas turbines, industrialfurnaces, heaters, and waste incinerators.In this paper we explore how Los Alamos became involvedwith the automotive industry, describe the origins and continu-ing evolution of KIVA, and discuss the process of transferringKIVA technology to a broad user community. We also discussreasons for the success of the program, some computationalrequirements, future directions, and the roles of the differentplayers, including that of the professional communicator, inthe technology transfer process.

    OR IGINS OF KIVAThe origins of KIVA may be found in computational meth-ods still in common use for nuclear weapons design. In theearly 1970s, Dan Butler and a small team in the computationalfluid dynamics (CFD) group at Los Alamos National Labo-ratory developed a reactive fluid dynamics program to studyhydrogen-fluorine (HF) chemical laser systems, under contractto the U. S . Air Force. Several years later, the nation founditself in the first energy crisis. In 1976 the National ScienceFoundation sponsored a meeting in which the participants wereasked to propose ways to make automotive engines morefuel-efficient and cleaner-burning. An invited participant atthis meeting, Butler realized that the program for modelingchemical lasers could be adapted to simulate reactive flows inan internal combustion engine. He came prepared with a movieof the modified HF program, which he showed at the meeting.It was evident that multi-dimensional CFD had been largelyoverlooked by industry as an analysis tool. Participants thoughtit had much promise. Thus began the affiliation between LosAlamos and the combustion research community.Under the auspices of the U. S . Energy Research and De-velopment Agency (ERDA), and its successor, the Departmentof Energy (DOE), four cooperative working groups emergedover the next several years, each with a different focus: direct-injection, stratified-charge (DISC) gasoline engines; dieselengines; fuel sprays; and homogeneous-charge engines. Each

    group gathered representatives from industry, universities, andTh e word kiva is southwestern in origin; it is a Pueblo ceremonial chamb erthat is usually roun d and set underground. It is entered from above by means ofa ladder through the roof. The analogy is made with a typical engine cylinder,in which the entrance and egress of gases is through valves set in the cylinder

    Article received July, 1993; revised September, 1993.The authors are with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos,IEEE Log Number 9213893. head.NM 87544.

    0162-8828/93$03.00 0 1993 IEEE

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    AMSDEN AND AMSDEN: KIVA STORY: PARADIGM OF TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

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    COMPUTATIONALLUIDDYNAMICS-A HISTORICAL ERSPEC~VEComputational fluid dynamics (CFD) is based on a set ofequations that were derived in 1827. The Navier-Stokesequations, as they are called, describe the space-timevariation of mass, momentum, and energy in fluid flow.

    Until the advent of supercomputers, their solution had to beaccomplished by sophisticated analytical techniques, whichprecluded the analysis of most of the complex scientific ancengineering problems encountered in todays technology.CFD got its start in the 1950s as a tool for designingnuclear weapons. Early codes were not very sophisticated,but they allowed weapons designers to understand what wactaking place at the instant of nuclear fission and to designweapons that require a minimum amount of fissionablematerial. Eventually, codes were created to study other kind:of flow problems, involving turbulence, material strength,chemical heat release, magnetic fields, and heat transfer.The earliest CFD models calculated solutions for unsteadyflows with one-dimensional symmetry. As computersevolved, it became possible to calculate flows accurately intwo and then three dimensions. The push to solveincreasingly complex fluid flows stimulated the developmenof supercomputers.CFD plays an integral role in a number of scientific andtechnical fields, including nuclear energy, explosives,plasma physics, propulsion, space science and astronomy,oceanography, and streamlining. Today CFD is usedextensively to solve flow problems, such as designingengines, aircraft, printed circuit boards, ballistic devices,pumps, and ventilation systems; molding and pouring newmaterials; and studying the global climate, astrophysics,ground seepage of toxic wastes, and nuclear reactor safety.For more information on CFD applications in mechanicalengineering, see [lo].

    several DOE laboratories, and met semiannually. The workinggroup format and the diversity of its membership provided agood venue for cultural sharing, which enabled the universitiesand national laboratories to learn the needs of industry, andindustry to gain an appreciation of numerical modeling as anadjunct to experimentation.The role of the fluid dynamics group at Los Alamos wasto develop a major combustion simulation program, initiallyto be used exclusively by the working group participants.At the time, industry had neither the CFD expertise northe computing power necessary to justify undertaking such adevelopment, but both these requirements could be met by LosAlamos. With input from the automotive industry, the programevolved in several well-defined increments. Initially, there wasa two-dimensional program, called APACHE, that had fixedboundaries. Next, in CONCHAS, the capability of a movingboundary was added to represent the motion of a piston,which allowed an air-fuel mixture to be compressed. The third

    stage, CONCHAS-SPRAY, included a sophisticated fuel-spraymodel with evaporation. The fourth stage of the evolutionadded a full three-dimensional capability; this program becameKIVA.As we have seen, KIVA did not spring full-grown intoexistence. It evolved through a series of programs that wereconsidered innovative for their time. The initial version ofKIVA, written in 1981-82, was too slow, even on a Cray-1 computer, to be of practical use for complex problems.Accordingly, the numerical solution algorithm was revisedand the implicit solution technique in use at the time wasreplaced with an explicit subcycling method. In an explicitmethod, the new-time value of a quantity such as pressure ortemperature is a function of surrounding old-time values, andmay be obtained directly. In an implicit method, the new-timevalue is a function of other new-time values, and in generalmust be obtained by means of an iteration.In addition, considerable effort was expended to tailor thecoding to work in a more optimal fashion on the Cray bytaking advantage of the vector capabilities of the machine.This meant rewriting much of the FORTRAN code to eliminateif-type decisions, instead using special vector constructs thatwould allow the computer to process data in chunks of 64numbers at one time. This task required a significant amountof code development time in 1982, but the payoff was that thevectorized version of KIVA now ran nearly five times fasterthan before. With these major modifications, the program wasbeginning to run at a speed acceptable to potential users.KIVA was released for collaborator testing to GeneralMotors Research Laboratories in 1983. Shortly thereafterit was released to Cummins Engine Company, PrincetonUniversity, Purdue University, and Sandia National Laboratoryat Livermore. Feedback from this group of friendly userswas necessary to improve the program to a level whereit could be considered for public release. The challengefacing the small KIVA team was two-fold: to demonstrate theusefulness of combustion modeling to a skeptical audience,and to continue improving the program.The first public release [l], [2] of KIVA was made in1985 through the National Energy Software Center (NESC)at Argonne National Laboratory, which served at the time asthe official distribution center for DOE-sponsored software.

    T H E TRANSFER PROCESSThe close working relationship between Los Alamos andindustry, as well as with other collaborative users of KIVA,was established at the outset and continues to this day. Theimportance of personal interaction is indispensable, becausethe true technology transfer of KIVA has taken place at thegrass roots level. Working group members communicate with

    the KIVA team not just at the semiannual meetings, butregularly by phone, fax, mail, and e-mail. For many years theteam consisted of a programmer and two physicists. Recentlyit acquired another programmer and several physicists whowork on new applications.The communication process underlying technology transferis interactive on multiple levels (see Table I). Users work-

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    192 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION,VOL. 36, NO. 4,DECEMBER 1993

    TABLE IAVENUESF CoMMUNlCATION IN TECH TRANSFER

    Level ofCommunicationGrass roots Grass roots Grass rootsvisiting scientist sharing of expertise technical stafftelephone conversation questions about technical staffe-mail questions and samples technical stafffax samples and problems technical staffmail requesting technology technical staffProgammatic Progammatic Progammaticmeetings directions to take, management andproposals obtain funding managementprogress reports show progress to management

    Q p e of Communication People Involved

    technology

    exchange of data technical staff

    snnnsnrFormal Formal Formalreports, articles report majordevelopmentspresentations, poster share new developmentssessionsvu-graphs show details of work

    videotapes explain work totechnical audience,sponsorsexplain work to generalpublicpress releases

    contracts, licensing establish contracts,

    technical staff,management, technicaleditortechnical staff,management, technicalwritertechnical staff,management, graphicartisttechnical staff,management, technicalwriter, video specialisttechnical staff,management, publicaffairs staffmanagement, legal staff,licenses, agreements technical writers

    ing directly with KIVA are in frequent contact with theprogrammer for issues involving code details and problemswith specific applications, and with the physicists for issuesconcerning the underlying theory. The level of contact betweenusers and developers is primarily informal (telephone, e-mail,fax, with some mail correspondence), although the interactionsmay lead to formal published papers and presentations. Topicsof discussion include requests and suggestions for new codecapabilities and improvements, contributions of code enhance-ments and new features, the reporting and resolution of codebugs, and collaboration on joint papers. Industrial managersand government agencies involved with more programmaticconcerns, such as proposals and funding, interact with theKIVA team leader. Programmatic contact is more formal andis carefully documented by specific forms, progress reports,and other correspondence. When the technology is transferredon a formal basis, through articles, briefings, and contracts,the professional communicator plays a role in helping toprepare reports for publication, videotapes, poster sessions,newsreleases, fact sheets, and presentation visuals.It has become increasingly common for KIVA users to cometo Los Alamos for days, weeks, or months to work directlywith the KIVA team. The largest commitment so far wasmade by the Cummins Engine Company, which assigned amechanical engineer to work at Los Alamos for a year. Alreadya KIVA user before coming to Los Alamos, the engineer madeuse of the computing power at Los Alamos to further themodeling efforts of Cummins. Even more important over the

    long term was his participation in improving integral partsof the program. For example, he contributed to replacing theexplicit subcycling solution method that had been adopted in1981-2 with a new and sophisticated implicit technique thatallowed a significant performance gain. The benefits of hisstay were mutual: The Los Alamos team, never more than2-3 people strong at any one time through the 1980s, had anappreciable gain in staff for a year; then Cummins regainedan employee who had become a KIVA expert with a wealthof experience in combustion modeling in general.

    KIVA MOVES INTO A WIDER WORLDIn 1987, the Los Alamos team presented a paper at theSociety of Automotive Engineers ( S A E ) International Con-gress [3]. It discussed a KIVA calculation of a DISC enginewith a complex three-dimensional geometry, which modeledthe compression of air after intake valve closure, the fuelinjection process, spark ignition, and the burning of the air-fuel mixture. Calculations were made under three differentengine load conditions; the results reported included compar-

    isons with experimental data of cylinder pressure historiesand analysis of exhaust products. Some of these comparedwell with experiment, others not so well. More important,perhaps, was that KIVA revealed flow details inaccessible tothe experimentalists. Of primary importance were graphics thatillustrated the position of the burning fuel cloud as a functionof time, which provided a possible explanation of why theengine, although performing quite well, had a higher level ofemissions than had been predicted. This was one of the firsttimes that such a detailed study had been reported; the paperreceived a 1988 S A E Arch T.Colwell Merit Award for makingan outstanding contribution to the automotive literature.One study alone hardly constitutes comprehensive bench-mark testing. The LosAlamos team and other users worldwidesoon began testing KIVA in a broad variety of applications.Over time a significant number of papers were presented,each focusing on some aspect of the model and often offeringextensions and improvements. The model itself was graduallybeing made more efficient and realistic, resulting in the publicrelease in 1989 of the improved version previously mentioned,called KIVA-I1 [4], [5] .Usage and acceptance of the program grew rapidly afterthe introduction of KIVA-11; today it is in use by the BigThree U. S . auto makers, Cummins, Caterpillar, many federallaboratories, and mechanical engineering departments at nu-merous universities. In 1990, a patent was issued to GeneralMotors [6] for a high-turbulence piston design that specificallyidentified three-dimensional computer simulation for makingthe invention possible. KIVA-I1 played a major role in thisdevelopment.Another area in which KIVA-I1 is being heavily used is inmodeling gas turbine combustors. Under NASA sponsorship,researchers are conducting a combined CFD-experimental pro-gram to study a variety of combustor designs. Their goal is tocontribute improved combustors with reduced NO, productionfor the next generation of civilian jet aircraft engines.

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    AMSDEN AND A M SD E N KIVA STORY PARADIGM OF TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

    Because KIVA was originally written to run on a Craycomputer, it contained coding that enhanced its performanceon Cray platforms. Cray Research, Inc., (CRI) realized themarketing potential for both the software package and Craycomputers. In 1992, Los Aiamos National Laboratory granteda license for KIVA to Cray Research, limited to Cray plat-forms. CRI improved the user interface and graphics, giving itmuch more of a user-oriented focus for design engineers, andis now marketing the enhanced version as CRUTyrboKIVA [7].Another avenue for technology transfer was created by thegrowing use of KIVA in engineering schools around the UnitedStates. With Masters and Ph.D. engineering students usingthe program for their thesis work, graduates with practicalCFD modeling experience are immediately useful to industry.Because KIVA-I1 is in the public domain, it is also in useby the major automotive manufacturers and many universitiesand laboratories in France, Italy, England, Germany, Sweden,Canada, and Japan. KIVA Users Groups publish newslettersand meet regularly in the United States, Europe, and reportedlyin Japan.

    KIv~4-3:W E LATEST VERSIONThe two earlier versions of KIVA lend themselves well toconfined in-cylinder flows and to a variety of open combustionsystems, but they can become quite inefficient to use incomplex geometries that contain such features as inlet portsand moving valves, diesel prechambers, and entire transferports. In these code versions, the entire domain of interestmust be encompassed by a single block of computationalzones, which may require that a significant number of zonesbe deactivated. The latest version of KIVA, known as KIVA-

    3, is intended to overcome this deficiency [8]. It differs fromKIVA-I1 in that it uses a block-structured grid, which allowscomplex geometries to be modeled with far greater efficiencythan KIVA-11, because discrete blocks of zones can now becoupled together to build the required structure. Figure 1 howsa computing mesh for a KIVA-3 model of a two-stroke engineand a schematic of the same engine for orientation purposes(Fig. l(a) and (b)).

    GRID GENERATIONND VISUALIZATIONOF RESULTSAs computer simulations become increasingly more pow-erful in their ability to model complex geometries, thereis a simultaneous need for more sophisticated methods ofgenerating computing grids (also known as meshes), and forbetter ways to visualize the results. In order to run KIVA-

    3, a user also must have a grid generator and graphicspostprocessor. Placeholder packages are supplied with KIVA-3 that will get the new user started and may be adequate formany users needs. In general, however, most users will wantto supply their own grid generator and postprocessor tailoredto their computer system and graphics software.Grid generation and postprocessing offer careers inthemselves, and indeed many people are working in them.CAD/CAM methods are being adopted, both to speed upthe grid generation process, and to represent the physicalgeometry more accurately. Because it is impossible to

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    A

    Fig. l(a). A schematic view of a crankcase-scavenged, two-stroke gasolineengine. This compact direct-injection, stratified-charge (DISC) engine candeliver more power from a smaller package with fewer parts than thetraditional four-stroke eng ine that it would replac e, and it has the potential forsimultaneously increasing fuel economy and reducing emissions. The pistonis at its lowest p osition, which permits exhaust air to lea ve the chamber andnew air to enter.

    Fig. l(b). A KIVA-3 computing mesh used to model flows in a simplifiedresearch version of the engine shown in Fig. l(a). The mesh actually depictsthe void created by the cylinder walls . What we se e is the space into which airand fuel com bine, are com pressed as the piston rises, and ultimately combust.The schematic in Fig. l(a) leaves out the main air transfer port because itwould block the view of the crankshaft.

    understand the results of a complex calculation by studying themillions of numbers it produces, increasingly better graphicspackages with color for improved flow visualization are beingintroduced so that the researcher can observe the evolutionof results at the computer terminal and produce a videotapeif necessary.

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    194 IEEE TRANSACTIONSON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, VOL. 36, NO . 4, DECEMBER 1993

    COMPUTING PLATFORMS FO R KIvAAs one can well imagine, with such a large user communityaround the world, KIVA has been adapted to a wide varietyof computer platforms of all sizes. There is a rapidly growinginterest in the new generation of powerful workstations, whichoffer significant computing power at a fraction of the price of asupercomputer. Among these are the IBM RISC Systed6000,

    the Silicon Graphics Iris, and the Sun Sparc. In response tothis interest, Los Alamos is releasing a new generic versionof KIVA-3 that runs on a variety of systems with minimalmodification. Although the generic version is 9-17% sloweron the Cray than the Cray-specific version, it demonstratesthat a single code version can run on many platforms. Thereis also interest in putting a number of computer workstationsin clusters to divide the load; the generic version will be thelogical starting point for adapting KIVA-3 to work in thisenvironment.Massively parallel supercomputers offer another computa-tional arena. An effort is currently under way at Los Alamos toadapt KIVA-I1 to work on the Thinking Machines, Inc., (TMI)Connection Machine CM-200 and CM-5. Portions of the codelend themselves quite well to a massively parallel architecture,but the spray and chemistry routines in particular will requiresignificant reformulation to achieve acceptable performanceon such platforms.PERFORMANCEND COMPUTINGREQUIREMENTS

    We are sometimes asked how long it takes to run a KIVAcalculation. On one processor of a Cray Y-MP8 (which haseight processors in all), a simple KIVA-3 calculation with only1000 computing zones might run in one minute. A parameterstudy using 10 000 zones that follows the flow of air withno spray or combustion through part of an engine revolutiontypically uses 10-20 minutes per calculation. Increasing themesh to 20 000 zones and running the code through onecomplete engine revolution might require about 1.5 hours. Themost intensive calculations of high-speed combusting sprays inmuch larger meshes may require 10hours or more. A currenthigh-end workstation, such as the IBM RISCSysted6000,requires 4-7 times longer to run these problems than the CrayOne measure of computer performance is millions offloating point operations per second, known as megaflops.The peak single-processor performance of the Cray Y-MP8is over 300 megaflops, although in the real world a practicalcomplex program can seldom achieve anything close to this.A KIVA-3 cold flow calculation, that is, air flow only withno fuel spray or chemical kinetics, runs at 100+ megaflops.A calculation with spray and chemistry will run at 50-60megaflops, the speed reduction resulting from the great amount

    of time spent in portions of the program that do not vectorize.The KIVA-3 memory requirement for a 20 000-cell calcu-lation is typically on the order of a megaword, at 64 bits perword. Significantly more storage is required for the output filesresulting from the calculation, however. Nevertheless, usefulcalculations may be run today on a workstation. A workstationwith 283 megabytes of memory has available 35 megawords

    Y-MP8.

    operating in double precision, because a 64-bit word lengthis required for complex CFD programs such as KIVA. Toput this in perspective, consider a Cray Y-MP8I8-128, whichhas 128 megawords of memory. The machine has eightprocessors, hence this means 16 megawords per processor.Running under a typical timesharing system, users have onlya single processor available, and although they are not strictlyconfined to its 16 megawords, it can become difficult to obtainmore than 32 megawords when many people are using thecomputer at the same time. The foregoing numbers explainthe increasing interest in powerful workstations, which arebecoming cost-effective tools for many CFD applications.

    THE KIVA USER COMMUNITYOrganizations expend considerable effort to use the KIVAprogram in spite of the fact that it is not an easy-to-use tool.They know that its results cannot-and should not-replaceexperimental work entirely. Nor does KIVA provide preciseanswers, because inaccuracies occur in the numerical approx-imations upon which KIVA is based. The program is alsolimited in accuracy by the resolution of the domain of interest,this limitation being imposed by the computing resources

    available. However, KIVA has demonstrated that it can savedesigners enormous costs and time in developing a productbecause it can suggest optimum configurations and eliminatea significant amount of expensive experimentation.KIVA is not unique. Quite a variety of CFD programs areavailable today, primarily from commercial vendors, with asubset of these applicable to combustion simulation. Some ofthese programs share features inspired by those that originatedin KIVA, in particular the spray model. One such programhas greater geometric flexibility than KIVA-3, at the expenseof increased internal complexity. The commercial programsare, of course, sold for profit, and the original source code isgenerally unavailable to the user. What is being marketed isthe object code, a black box that has been tailored to theusers requirements, backed up with service and consultation.In contrast to commercial programs, the relatively low costand ready availability of the source code has created a wideKIVA user community, particularly through the engineeringschools. What the KIVA user forfeits is service and consul-tation, because the Los Alamos team has few resources andtherefore must work primarily with its direct collaborators. TheKIVA user also has to contend with a basic research tool thatcannot be treated as a black box. Its use requires a non-triviallevel of sophistication and experience with CFD modeling,along with a good grasp of spray and combustion theory, butthese same abilities are also required if one is to make thebest use of a commercial program. CRI/TurboKIVA is the up-market alternative to the public domain version of KIVA, andcomes with professional support services.A major benefit to those working with the KIVA source codeis that one person designed and wrote all the program versions

    of KIVA over a 12-year period. The result is continuity oflogic, ease of readability, and cleanness. In contrast, a typicalCFD program written at a university has contributions fromnumerous students over the years and gradually accumulatesa lot of dead wood.

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    Fig. 2. During his visit to Los Alamos National Laboratory on May 17,1993, President Clinton was briefed on KIVA a pplications and saw a videoof several calculations. (Photo courtesy of James E. Rickman, Los AlamosMonitor.)

    Research versions of KIVA-I1 and KIVA-3 from LosAlamosare now being distributed by the Energy Science and Technol-ogy Software Center (ESTSC) at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, whichbecame the centralized software management center for theDOE in October 1991, replacing the National Energy SoftwareCenter. There are no distribution restrictions on KIVA-11,but KIVA-3 will not be available for distribution outside theUnited States for several years, to give U. S. industry an edgeover its foreign competition.

    KIVA DEVELOPMENTONTINUESImprovement of the submodels in KIVA is a continuing

    process, particularly in the areas of turbulence, chemicalkinetics, and sprays. Although the automotive industry hasbeen the driving force behind KIVA development over theyears, new applications continue to arise. Los Alamos is nowcollaborating with KIVA users in government, industry anduniversities who are modeling complex flows in gasturbinecombustors, advanced diesel and two-stroke gasoline engines[9], and continuous sprays in industrial boilers and heaters.Several current projects are being funded by the AdvancedResearch Projects Agency (ARPA), National Institute of Stan-dards and Technology (NIST), and the National Aeronauticsand Space Administration (NASA), in addition to the DOE.A major thrust for funding in the future appears to be cooper-ative research and development agreements (CRADAs) withindustrial partners and other national laboratories on a varietyof combustion studies.

    CONCLUSIONIn April 1993, the Los Alamos KIVA team received aFederal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) 1993 Award for Excel-

    lence in Technology Transfer. FLC awards recognize FederalLaboratory employees who have done an outstanding jobof transferring technology developed in the laboratory tooutside users such as other government agencies or the privatesector. This is regarded as a significant honor, considering thehundreds of federal laboratories across the United States thatare members of the FLC, and that only 28 submissions wereselected to receive awards in 1993. When the project began,the KIVA team never envisioned that the program would goas far as it has.Hindsight shows what made the transfer process a success:It was based not on working in isolation and then presentingthe world with a finished combustion simulation program,but rather on working steadily on a daily basis with theuser community throughout the development process, andresponding to industry needs. In addition, the availability of theKIVA source code has made it widely disseminated throughoutthe university system, so that today students who graduate withKIVA and other CFD skills are ready to apply their knowledgein industry.

    REFERENCESA. A. Amsden, T. D. Butler, P. J. ORourke, and J. D. Ramshaw,KIVA-A comprehensive model for 2-D and 3-D engine simulations,S4E Paper 850554, 1985.A. A. Amsden, J. D. Ramshaw, P. J. ORourke, and J. K. Dukowicz,KIVA A computer program for two- and three-dimensional fluidflows with chemical reactions and fuel sprays, Los Alamos NationalLaboratory Report LA-10245-M S, 1985.P. J. ORourke and A. A . Amsden, Three-dimensional numerical sim-ulations of the U PS-292 stratified charge engine, SAEPaper 870597,1987.A. A. Amsden, T. D. Butler, and P. J. ORourke, The KIVA-I1 computerprogram for transient multidimensional chemically reactive flows withsprays, SAE Paper 872072, 1987.A. A. Amsden, P. J. ORourke, and T. D. Butler, KIVA-11: A com-puter program for chemically reactive flows with sprays, Los AlamosNational Laboratory report LA-IlStiO-MS, 1989.R. Diwakar et al. Engine and H igh Turbulence Piston Therefor, U. S.Patent No. 4,955,338, 1990.R. Taghavi, CR1,TurboKIVA delivers the power of insight, CrayChannels 13, no. 4, pp, 26-27, 199 2.A. A. A msden, KIVA-3: A KIVA Program with block-structured meshfor complex geometries, Los Alamos National Laboratory report LA-12503-MS, 1993.A. A. Amsden, P. J. ORourke, T. D. Butler, K. Meintjes, and T. D.Fansler, Comparisons of computed and measured three-dimensionalvelocity fields in a motored two-stroke engine, SAE Paper 920418,1992.A. Wolfe, CFD software: Pushing analysis to the limit, MechanicalEngineering, Jan. 1991, pp. 48-54.

    Dorothy Comer Amsden is a senior technology analyst at Los AlamosNational Laboratory, where she researches national security issues pertainingto economic competitiveness, export control, and nuclear nonproliferation.She has 25 years experience as a technical writer, editor, and translator, thelast 17 of which have been at Los Alamos.

    Anthony A. Amsden began systems programming at Los Alamos in 1960,then moved to scientific programming in the Fluid Dynamics group, wherehe has been for 30 years. Over the past 12 years, he has developed andprogrammed the KIVA family of codes, an undertaking recognized by aDistinquished Performance Award in 1990.