Influence of Coupled Radiation and Ablation on the Aerothermodynamic Environment of Planetary Entry Vehicles

A review of recently published coupled radiation and ablation capabilities involving the simulation of hypersonic flowfields relevant to Earth, Mars, or Venus entry is presented. The three fundamental mechanisms of radiation coupling are identified as radiative cooling, precursor photochemistry, and ablation-radiation interaction. The impact of these mechanisms are shown to be significant for a 3 m radius sphere entering Earth at hypothetical Mars return conditions (approximately 15 km/s). To estimate the influence precursor absorption on the radiative flux for a wide range of conditions, a simplified approach is developed that requires only the non-precursor solution. Details of a developed coupled ablation approach, which is capable of treating both massively ablating flowfields in the sublimation regime and weakly ablating diffusion Climited oxidation cases, are presented. A review of the two primary uncoupled ablation approximations, identified as the blowing correction and film coefficient approximations, is made and their impact for Earth and Mars entries is shown to be significant for recession and convective heating predictions. Fully coupled ablation and radiation simulations are presented for the Mars return sphere throughout its entire trajectory. Applying to the Mars return sphere the Pioneer- Venus heritage carbon phenolic heatshield, which has properties available in the open literature, the differences between steady state ablation and coupling to a material response code are shown to be significant.

[1]  L. Brewer,et al.  Spectrum of C3 , 1962 .

[2]  R. Svehla,et al.  Estimated Viscosities and Thermal Conductivities of Gases at High Temperatures , 1962 .

[3]  K. K. Yoshikawa.  ANALYSIS OF RADIATIVE HEAT TRANSFER FOR LARGE OBJECTS AT METEORIC SPEEDS , 1967 .

[4]  Effect of shock precursor heating on radiative flux to blunt bodies , 1969 .

[5]  A. C. Allison,et al.  Band oscillator strengths and transition probabilities for the Lyman and Werner systems of H2, HD, and D2 , 1969 .

[6]  V. K. Vertushkin,et al.  Role of the absorption of radiation ahead of a shock wave with hypersonic flow around a blunt body , 1970 .

[7]  R. Anderson,et al.  Structure and luminosity of strong shock waves in air , 1973 .

[8]  Variation of the Van Driest damping parameter with mass transfer. , 1973 .

[9]  B. Lewis.  Experimentally-determined oscillator strengths for molecular hydrogen—II. The Lyman and Werner bands below 900 Å, the B′-X and the D-X bands , 1974 .

[10]  W. Fabian,et al.  Experimentally determined oscillator strengths for molecular hydrogen—I. The Lyman and Werner bands above 900Å , 1974 .

[11]  J. J. Jones,et al.  Radiative flux penetration through a blown shock layer for Jupiter entry conditions , 1978 .

[12]  D. M. Cooper,et al.  An experimental determination of the cross section of the Swings band system of C3 , 1979 .

[13]  D. M. Cooper,et al.  Line-by-line transport calculations for Jupiter entry probes. [of radiative transfer] , 1979 .

[14]  Line-by-Line Transport Calculations for Jupiter Entry Probes , 1980 .

[15]  Optical absorption of carbon and hydrocarbon species from shock heated acetylene and methane in the 135-220 nm wavelength range , 1981 .

[16]  L. Carlson,et al.  Effects of shock wave precursors ahead of hypersonic entry vehicles , 1992 .

[17]  R. A. Thompson,et al.  The addition of algebraic turbulence modeling to program LAURA , 1993 .

[18]  V. V. Shuvalov,et al.  Radiation emitted during the flight of asteroids and comets through the atmosphere , 1994 .

[19]  G. S. Romanov,et al.  Thermodynamic and optical properties of gases in a wide range of parameters , 1995 .

[20]  Emission and Ablation of a Large Meteoroid in the Course of Its Motion through the Earth's Atmosphere , 1996 .

[21]  Harry Partridge,et al.  Chemical-kinetic parameters of hyperbolic Earth entry , 2000 .

[22]  Sanford Gordon,et al.  NASA Glenn Coefficients for Calculating Thermodynamic Properties of Individual Species , 2002 .

[23]  S. Penner.  Physics of shock waves and high-temperature hydrodynamic phenomena - Ya.B. Zeldovich and Yu.P. Raizer (translated from the Russian and then edited by Wallace D. Hayes and Ronald F. Probstein); Dover Publications, New York, 2002, 944 pp., $34. , 2003 .

[24]  M. Wright,et al.  Recommended Collision Integrals for Transport Property Computations Part 1: Air Species , 2005 .

[25]  M. Dudeck,et al.  Arrays of radiative transition probabilities for CO2–N2 plasmas , 2006 .

[26]  T. Schmidt,et al.  Oscillator strengths and radiative lifetimes for C2: Swan, Ballik-Ramsay, Phillips, and dΠg3←cΣu+3 systems , 2007 .

[27]  D. Hash,et al.  Validation Process for Blowing and Transpiration-Cooling in DPLR , 2007 .

[28]  T. Schmidt,et al.  Oscillator strengths of the Mulliken, Swan, Ballik-Ramsay, Phillips, and d3Pi g<--c 3Sigma u+ systems of C2 calculated by MRCI methods utilizing a biorthogonal transformation of CASSCF orbitals. , 2007, The Journal of chemical physics.

[29]  M. Wright,et al.  Recommended Collision Integrals for Transport Property Computations Part 2: Mars and Venus Entries , 2007 .

[30]  D. Bianchi,et al.  A numerical approach for high-temperatures flows over ablating surfaces , 2007 .

[31]  B. Hollis,et al.  Spectrum Modeling for Air Shock-Layer Radiation at Lunar-Return Conditions , 2008 .

[32]  Richard A. Thompson,et al.  Implementation of a Blowing Boundary Condition in the LAURA Code , 2008 .

[33]  Alireza Mazaheri,et al.  A Study of Ablation-Flowfield Coupling Relevant to Orion Heatshield , 2009 .

[34]  Philippe Rivière,et al.  Spectroscopic data for the prediction of radiative transfer in CO2–N2 plasmas , 2009 .

[35]  Peter A. Gnoffo,et al.  Implementation of Radiation, Ablation, and Free Energy Minimization in Hypersonic Simulations , 2010 .

[36]  Alireza Mazaheri,et al.  Assessment of Radiative Heating Uncertainty for Hyperbolic Earth Entry , 2011 .

[37]  Roy H. Stogner,et al.  Loose-coupling algorithm for simulating hypersonic flows with radiation and ablation , 2011 .

[38]  Christopher O. Johnston,et al.  Shock Layer Radiation Modeling and Uncertainty for Mars Entry , 2012 .