Dependence and sensitivity on the aerothermochemical model of atmospheric reentry trajectories

¹ Seconda Università di Napoli (SUN), Dipartimento di Ingegneria Aerospaziale e Meccanica (DIAM), Via Roma 29, Aversa 81031, Italy
² Centro Italiano Ricerche Aerospaziali (CIRA), Via Maiorise, Capua 81043, Italy

Abstract

Several numerical analyses have been conducted to examine the effects of some state-of-the-art chemistry models on the aerothermodynamic performances of hypervelocity blunt vehicles. At the beginning, the reentry flight scenario has been defined, and the aeroheating environment has been analyzed, for the achievement of a realistic representation of the flight trajectory for a preliminary estimation of real gas effects. After the definition of the freestream conditions in which the peak heating occurs, several set of reactions have been analyzed in numerical computations. In this way, it has been possible to carry out a dispersion analysis, due to the aerothermochemical model, of the vehicle flight scenario. In detail, it has been analyzed the influence of the technique for the aerodynamic database definition (engineering, panel, and viscous computations methods) on remarkable parameters like peak heating, thermal load, crossrange, and downrange. Then, the analysis of different kind of reactions allows to investigate the reaction mechanism and to understand the main dissociation reactions occurring in high energy flows.