Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.
The transient characteristics of the reentry flow field with graphite ablation are investigated through numerical simulation. The governing equations for the flow field are Navier-Stokes equations with thermo-chemical non-equilibrium, and that for the heat-shield is the unsteady heat equation. 16-species are considered, thermal non-equilibrium and the coupling of vibration and chemical reactions are described with the two-temperature model. The simulation is performed on a sphere with radius of 1m at a free-stream speed of 10km/s and an altitude of 65km, where the thickness of the heat shield is set to 0.05m, 0.1m, and 0.2m, respectively. The analyses are conducted about not only the time evolutions of the flow field properties and the shield temperature distribution, but also the effects of the shield thickness on them.
