Development of a Unified Model for Flow-Material Interaction Applied to Porous Charring Ablators

摘要

Ablative porous materials can accommodate high heating rates and heat loads through phase change and mass loss. The objective of this work is to set the ground to the accurate numerical reproduction of the degradation that these materials undergo during the atmospheric entry phase of space missions. The used numerical solver features a high-order discontinuous Galerkin discretization and solves the volume-averaged Navier-Stokes equations handling the porous material and the surrounding flow field in the same domain of computation. The treatment of pyrolysis reactions using the Goldstein's model is implemented within this unified methodology and tested via code-to-code comparison with a more conventional thermal response solver on open literature test cases. The results obtained show good agreement and highlight the advantages of using the unified approach to accurately study the ablation of charring thermal protection materials.