Novel Engineering Methodology for Decoupled Aerothermal Analysis of Hypersonic Atmospheric Entry Flows

What is it about?

Since the 1950s, thermal response modeling has relied on look-up tables based on energy/mass exchange analogy to evaluate the ablation of the heat shield of hypersonic vehicles. The only alternative to this method has been to use a fully coupled approach, where the thermal response code is intimately coupled to a CFD code. This approach, however, is not computationally viable for almost all intents and purposes. The method presented here proposes a novel approach where the CFD code are used a priori to build physics-based look up tables, where prior assumptions are no longer necessary. The method is thus accurate, but still computationally efficient for heat shield design purposes.

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