Aerospace Vehicle Signature Modeling Technologies

During hypersonic reentry, the flow around reentry vehicles is dominated by its high enthalpy and high temperature effects, which must be properly modeled in order to generate flowfields from which trustworthy vehicle signatures can be extracted. Ionization, plasmas, non-equilibrium chemistry and modeling of vibration energy, surface chemistry including ablation and associated surface recession, and path dependent surface heating all have non-trivial contributions to the flowfield. Modeling these flows requires expertise, advanced tools and substantial user time. The Phase II program will address these issues by developing a toolset and standardized workflow which will allow for production level generation of these flowfields with greater ease and at a significantly reduced time-cost. The well-documented workflow will incorporate best practices for hypersonic simulations, and include a distributable example problem characteristic of real flight vehicles that can be used for benchmarking. Approved for Public Release | 18-MDA-9710 (6 Jul 18)