Martin SPEL, Eddy CONSTANT, Valentin MONTEILLET, Jean-Pierre TRIBOT
DOI Number XXX-YYY-ZZZ
Conference Number HiSST-2022-299
R.Tech develops its own CFD software MISTRAL since 2004. The code MISTRAL is composed of several
modules, of which MISTRAL-CFD is of interest for the current study. MISTRAL-CFD is a chemical and
thermal non-equilibrium Navier-Stokes solver. The code has been used and validated in a large number
of French and European projects [1].
Recently, R.Tech develops the coupling between MISTRAL to solve the hypersonic flow and OpenFoam
to compute the heat transfer through the structure. A first validation of the coupling has been achieved
in [2] , by comparing the thermal evolution in a honeycomb structure placed in a hypersonic wind tunnel.
As part of its validation to address re-entry issues, the purpose of the associated paper is to present
the rebuilding using MISTRAL CFD coupled to OpenFoam thermal solver (chtMultiregionFoam [3]) on
the IXV flight which provides extremely valuable data for code validation purposes. This study is a first
approach to CFD/heat transfer coupling validation with MISTRAL on a real re-entry flight case which set
the basis of a high-fidelity multi-physical tool gathering CFD, material behavior and degradation in the
future.
A study on the modeling effects has been performed, showing that the most important modeling aspect
remains the catalycity model. A modification of a standard atmosphere model by reconstructing atmospheric density show a really good fit with the flight data. Transient heat conduction studies have been
performed showing the importance of applying a couples CFD-transient heat transfer approach for this
kind of study.