Computational Study on Radiative Aerothermodynamics of a Reentry Space Vehicle

Under hypersonic flight conditions, a vehicle travelling through the atmosphere could excite the air that flows around the body to very high temperatures as the kinetic energy of the vehicle is dissipated to the gas. Depending on the flight velocity, various chemical reactions will be produced behind a shock wave for stagnation region. These reactions greatly change the properties of air and cause considerable deviation from those of a thermally and calorically perfect gas. A vehicle flying through the higher altitude of the atmosphere at high velocities may also experience thermal non-equilibrium since the lower density reduces the collision frequency and the high velocity results in smaller transit times for the air molecules. Under such extremely thermal circumstances, the heat transfer by convection and radiation around a vehicle has been one of key issues for thermal protection system (TPS). In this paper, the computational aerothermodynamics with fully coupled radiative heat transfer is developed. To validate the proposed approach, it is employed to simulate the thermal and chemical nonequilibrium flows over Stardust. The computed results on the reentry space vehicle reveal both of convective flux and radiative flux are in good agreements with other predicted results.

Analysis of gas flow over a cylinder at all Knudsen numbers based on non-newtonian constitutive models

This paper is focused on the gas properties over a cylinder from continuum to rarefied regimes based on the non-Newtonian constitutive model. This new constitutive model is first derived from Eu’s nonequilibrium ensemble method, which is intended for accurate description of nonequilibrium flows. Some assumptions and simplifications are made during the establishing progress of the new constitutive model by both Eu and Myong. To verify its accuracy, temperature contours and skin frictions around the cylinder are simulated by this new model. The inflow Mach number is equal to 10 and the Knudsen number ranges from 0.002 to 0.05. All simulation results are compared with Navier–Stokes (NS) and the direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) methods in detail. The comparisons of friction around the surface show that the non-Newtonian constitutive models are better than the linear constitutive relations of NS equations for the prediction of nonequilibrium flow and much more close to DSMC simulation results.