Numerical Investigation of Radiative Transfers Interactions with Material Ablative Response for Hypersonic Atmospheric Entry

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-fidelity, tightly coupled multi-physics simulation framework that accurately models radiative transfer interactions with material ablation during hypersonic atmospheric entry, revealing significant effects on heat loads and ablation rates.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-solver framework that fully couples shock-heated gases, surface ablation, and radiative transfer, improving accuracy over simplified models.

Findings

Radiative heating significantly impacts ablation rates.

Ablation products absorb and emit radiation in specific spectra.

Tightly coupled models outperform loosely coupled approximations.

Abstract

Radiative transfer interactions with material ablation are critical contributors to vehicle heating during high-altitude, high-velocity atmospheric entry. However, the inherent complexity of fully coupled multi-physics models often necessitates simplifying assumptions, which may overlook key phenomena that significantly affect heat loads, particularly radiative heating. Common approximations include neglecting the contribution of ablation products, applying simplified frozen wall boundary conditions, or treating radiative transfer in a loosely coupled manner. This study introduces a high-fidelity, tightly coupled multi-solver framework designed to accurately capture the multi-physics challenges of hypersonic flow around an ablative body. The proposed approach consistently accounts for the interactions between shock-heated gases, surface material response, and radiative transfer. Our results demonstrate that including radiative heating in the surface energy balance substantially influences the ablation rate. Ablation products are shown to absorb radiative heat flux in the vacuum-ultraviolet spectrum along the stagnation line, while strongly emitting in off-stagnation regions. These findings emphasize the necessity of a tightly coupled multiphysics framework to faithfully capture the complex, multidimensional interactions in hypersonic flow environments, which conventional, loosely coupled models fail to represent accurately.