Simulation of Hypersonic Reentry Vehicles

A frame work has been setup for the simulation of hypersonic reentry vehicles using commercial codes FLUENT and LS-DYNA. The main goal of this work was to set up a simple approach for the heat flux prediction and evaluation of the material thermal response during the reentry of the vehicle. Fluid thermal coupling for predicting the thermal response of a reusable non-ablating thermal protection system was set up. The computational fluid dynamics code (FLUENT) and the material thermal response codes (LS-DYNA) are loosely coupled to achieve the solution. The vehicle considered in the calculation is an axisymmetric vehicle flying at zero degree angle of attack. The frame work set up was validated with the results available in the literature. Good correlation was observed between the results from the commercial codes and the results from the literature. The mesh movement capability in LS-DYNA was implemented enabling future modeling of ablating thermal protection system.