Numerical Assessment of Camphor Ablation Flight Relevance in Hypersonic Wind-Tunnel Testing

What is it about?

Designing thermal protection systems (TPS) for ballistic re-entry capsules requires both reliable numerical tools and experimental facilities in order to evaluate surface ablation and its shape change. Low-temperature ablators, such as camphor, can be experimentally employed in low-enthalpy wind tunnels to overcome limitations of standard hypersonic experimental facilities, which cannot induce the actual TPS capsule shape change. However, the flight relevance of the shape change of low-temperature ablators needs to be accurately assessed, as both the capsule dimension and the ablative material during the test differ from the flying ones. The main objective of this work is to perform numerical simulations in order to assess the flight relevance of the ground tests.

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