Theory of plume radiance from the bow shock ultraviolet 2 rocket flight

Abstract

A computational fluid dynamics algorithm is used to simulate the flow field and solid rocket motor plume about the bow shock ultraviolet 2 flight vehicle. A new computationally efficient algorithm to model two-phase gas and particulate flow is developed. The flow over the complete rocket geometry and its interaction with the particle-laden plume is simulated. The computed plume radiance is compared with radiometric and spectroscopic data and good agreement with radiance magnitudes and spectral characteristics is obtained for the intrinsic core rocket exhaust data. The computation underpredicts the observed signal from the far-field photometers by many orders of magnitude. Based on the particulate flow simulations developed here and new experimental data, we hypothesize that the far-field radiation is due to molecular emission. Use of the CO Cameron band spectra obtained on this flight provides an estimate of the governing temperature of such radiation.