Influence of the Control Temperature of Park's Two-temperature Model on the Mars Pathfinder Reactive Hypersonic Flow

TL;DR

This study investigates how the control temperature weight factors in Park's two-temperature model influence the simulation of reactive hypersonic flow around the Mars Pathfinder capsule, revealing their impact on temperature distribution but not on shock position or heat flux.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the effect of weight factors in Park's model on hypersonic flow simulations, enhancing understanding of non-equilibrium flow modeling for Mars entry conditions.

Findings

Varying weight factors has negligible effect on shock position.

Changes in weight factors significantly affect maximum temperature modes.

Results align well with existing experimental data.

Abstract

Numerical simulations of reactive hypersonic flow under thermodynamic and chemical non-equilibrium conditions are presented for the Mars Pathfinder capsule. An 8-species chemical model is employed to simulate Mars' atmosphere. Park's two-temperature model is used to account for the thermal non-equilibrium phenomena. The present work analyzes the impact of different values of the weight factors used in Park's model, aiming to broaden the understanding of the weight factors influence. The code used to simulate the flows solves the Navier-Stokes equations modified to account for reacting gas mixtures. The findings are depicted in terms of the Mach number and temperature modes along the stagnation streamline in a region close to the shock wave. The present analysis also includes results regarding the stagnation point convective heat flux. The results indicate that varying the weight factors yields negligible differences in the shock wave position and stagnation point convective heat flux. The changes in the weight factors cause variations in the maximum temperature mode values in the non-equilibrium region. The results presented are in good agreement with experimental data present in the literature. The present work indicates that Park's two-temperature model weight factors can substantially affect the temperature mode distributions in the flow non-equilibrium region.