Development of an efficient 3D radiation transfer solver for atmospheric entry flows

Abstract

Spacecraft undergo severe convective and radiative heating from the surrounding aerothermodynamic environment during their atmospheric entry at high velocities. An accurate heat-flux prediction during the design of such vehicles is therefore paramount for the success and safety of future planetary missions. The numerical simulation of hypersonic reactive plasma flows coupled with radiative heat transfer is an active research topic for the design of thermal protection systems of future space missions, in particular for the Mars exploration program. The numerical simulation of radiative transfer is a challenging problem because of the spatial, angular, and spectral dependence of the radiation field. The reference approach for treating the spectral dependence is the Line-By-Line (LBL) method which consists in finely discretizing the radiative properties over the relevant spectral range. These radiative properties depend on level populations and on fundamental spectroscopic data. We propose to implement a statistical narrow band formulation into the finite-volume algorithm for radiative heat-transfer of the COOLFuiD platform to decrease the computational time. 3D radiation fields will be computed for atmospheric entries of space missions. This work is related to the ABLARADABLA project of the European Space Agency.