Re-entry ablation
As part of a NASA funded project on the simulation of space vehicle re-entry, a new pyrolysis code is developed in order to simulate the ablation of heat-shields. The code is coupled with the in-house hypersonic flow solver LeMANS, and accounts for chemical reactions, pyrolysis gas movements, composition and porosity of the heat-shield, moving boundaries, radiation and heat transfer within the material.
Fig 1: Temperature distribution of the flow field and in the
solid wall of the IRV-2 re-entry vehicle at t = 6.75 s of a trajectory