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Towards High-Fidelity Modeling of Arc-Jet Environments and Material Response

AMS Seminar Series

Speaker: Jeremie Meurisse, Science and Technology Corporation / NASA Ames Research Center

Presentation

Seminar Slide Deck (PDF-7.9MB)

Abstract

This presentation will discuss the high-fidelity modeling of arc-jet environments and materials, an ongoing effort by the Entry Systems Modeling (ESM) project. The ESM project is developing and exploring high-fidelity tools for the analysis of Thermal Protection Systems (TPS). Arc-jets are unique facilities used to evaluate the performance of TPS for hypersonic vehicles. They produce high pressure and high enthalpy plasma flows to simulate the extreme heat encountered during atmospheric entry.

This presentation will show high-fidelity simulations using ARCHeS, DPLR, and PATO for modeling and study of TPS materials, including a detailed three-dimensional heat and mass transfer analysis of the full-scale Mars Science and Laboratory (MSL) tiled heatshield, and the material response of the baby-SPRITE geometry in the Hypersonic Materials Environmental Test System (HyMETS) arc-jet facility.

  • The ARC Heater Simulator (ARCHeS) software, a three-dimensional unsteady plasma flow analysis tool developed at NASA, is used to model the arc heater part. Coupled Navier-Stokes, radiative transfer, and Maxwell equations yield current density, magnetism, radiation, and flow field solutions. This work constitutes the first demonstration of an unsteady three-dimensional plasma flow simulation of high pressure and high enthalpy arc heater that captures kink instabilities of the electric arc. It is found that the arc attachment is mainly driven by upstream arc instabilities.
  • The Data Parallel Line Relaxation (DPLR), a suite of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools for the computation of supersonic and hypersonic flows in chemical and thermal nonequilibrium developed at NASA, is used to model the flow in the nozzle and test chamber sections of the arc-jet.
  • The Porous material Analysis Toolbox based on OpenFOAM (PATO), a software developed at NASA that includes a generic heat and mass transfer model for porous reactive materials, is used to model the material response of the test sample. PATO solves the conservation equations of solid mass, gas mass, gas momentum, and total energy, using a volume-averaged formulation that includes the production of gases from the decomposition of the polymeric matrix.

Biography

Photo of Jeremie Meurisse
Jeremie Meurisse is a research scientist for the Science and Technology Corporation working in the Computational Physics Branch of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at NASA Ames Research Center. He joined the Entry Systems Modeling (ESM) project at NASA in June 2015. He obtained his M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from ISAE Supaero in France (2015). Meurisse also holds an M.S. in Electromechanics from the Polytechnic Louvain School of Engineering in Belgium (2013). His work at NASA focuses on plasma flow modeling of high pressure and high enthalpy arc heaters and on porous material modeling at the macro-scale. He has been the main developer of ARCHeS and PATO software since joining NASA in 2015.