Unified Calculation of Hypersonic Flowfield for a Reentry Vehicle

Abstract

A unified computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method is developed that integrates numerical methods for solving specific problems related to aerodynamic heating phenomena and ablative heatshield. With the use of this unified CFD code, trajectory-based analysis on the aerodynamic heating environment for the MUSES-C superorbital reentry capsule is conducted. Converged solutions can be obtained by loosely coupling the CFD code and the charring materials ablation code within a few iterations