Chay W. C. Atkins and Ralf Deiterding
DOI Number XXX-YYY-ZZZ
Conference Number HiSST-2022-112
The extreme conditions experienced in hypersonic flight can be difficult to reproduce in ground test
facilities. As such, the use of computational simulations is vital in the design of Thermal Protection
Systems (TPSs) for hypersonic vehicles. Many TPSs use materials that ablate and this leads to changes
in shape of the body with time. As such, the computational mesh needs to be updated, whilst maintaining
a high resolution in the shock and boundary layer regions, which can require significant user input. In
this work, a prototype strand/Cartesian Adaptive Mesh Refinement (CAMR) solver has been created using
the AMROC (Adaptive Mesh Refinement in Objectoriented C++) framework, that enables meshes to be
generated with minimal user input. The strand/CAMR technique combines a “strand” mesh, grown from
a discretised surface, in the nearbody region with an adaptive Cartesian mesh in the offbody region in
order to highly resolve offbody shocks and boundary layers. The development of the offbody and nearbody twotemperature NavierStokes solvers, and the overset algorithms used to join the two regions,
is described. A series of test cases that aim to verify and validate the hypersonic 2D/axisymmetric
strand/CAMR solver are presented. An orderofaccruacy test is carried out on an overset domain to
verify the implementation of the new spatial and timeintegration methods. A highenthalpy experiment
is simulated in order to validate the new solver and investigate the influence of the overset mesh on heat
flux predictions. Finally, the automated surface deformation enabled by the new solver is demonstrated
through the simulation of a recessing nosetip. The results indicate that the strand/CAMR technique can
be used to accurately simulate vehicles in hypersonic flows and offers a high level of automation.