CFD Analysis of radiative heat loading on hypervelocity re-entry vehicles

Abstract

Space exploration missions may include atmospheric entries at high velocities (e.g. sample-return, hyperbolic entries) or into an atmosphere with highly radiative constituents (e.g. Jupiter, Titan). The effects of gas radiation in the shock layer can become significant at such flow conditions. This requires adequate modeling of the local absorption and emission properties and the energy transport by radiation. This paper describes a Monte-Carlo based method to solve the radiative transfer equation. The resulting energy sources are coupled to a CFD solver to account for the additional mechanism of radiative energy transport. This approach is validated using a canonical test problem and then applied to the FIRE II flight experiment configuration.