On Rocket Plume, Lunar Crater and Lunar Dust Interactions

摘要

This paper presents our recent progress on the investigations of rocket Plume-Crate interaction and Lunar/Martian Dust Interaction (PDI). PDI is a very challenging problem of complex flow/soil interactions, involved with multi-physics, multi-scales, multi-dimensions, and multi-species. We are developing hybrid computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package, with the direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) and gaskinetic BGK method to simulate the lunar rarefied flowfield in an accurate and efficient manner. For dust liftoff/trajectory, we adopt discrete element method (DEM) to simulate single dust particle ejection, and the overlay method to move the dust particles in the flow field obtained by the DSMC and gaskinetic BGK method. Meanwhile two physical-based models employing DEM are under development as improved computational tools for the predictions of crater formulation/evolution.