Thomas J. GREENSLADE, Arunkumar CHINNAPPAN, Minkwan KIM
DOI Number: 10.60853/mdjq-bs76
Conference number: HiSST-2024-00240
The renewed interest in hypersonic flights has brought fresh attention to the physical challenges in reusable thermal protection systems. The need to enhance the reliability of hypersonic and re-entry vehicles has sharply focused on the limitations of our current comprehension of thermos-chemical non-equilibrium flows and our restricted predictive capabilities. This paper presents the work carried out by the University of Southampton and our consortium partners within the MEESST collaboration. This project is currently involved in both numerical and experimental research to develop magnetic shielding techniques for atmospheric re-entry vehicles. These techniques aim to offer additional approaches for mitigating heat flux. Here, we present the results of multi-physics simulations conducted with the University of Southampton’s HANSA toolkit, along with comparisons, both experimental and numerical, produced by our consortium partners. These encompass simulations of multiple capsules undergoing atmospheric re-entry and simulations of ground-based experimental campaigns. We give particular attention to the effects of thermo-chemical non-equilibrium and MHD modeling. We illustrate the impacts of various mathematical models on the results obtained, with a strong emphasis on mission-critical parameters like surface heat fluxes and electron densities. We also present conclusions regarding the implications of these results on magnetic shielding designs. We demonstrate differences in thermal relaxation rates in terms of their effects on impinging heat fluxes. We then investigate the influence of these rate variations on magnetic heat flux mitigation techniques. Lastly, we offer an overview of current knowledge gaps in areas crucial to MEESST and lay out plans for future simulations and experiments, both within the MEESST project and beyond.