Mutlu Çelik, Ömür Uğur, Sinan Eyi, Numerical Modeling of Hypersonic Air and Carbon Dioxide Flows in Thermochemical Non-equilibrium with SU2-NEMO Solver, in: The 2nd International Conference on Flight Vehicles, Aerothermodynamics and Re-entry Missions Engineering (FAR), 19–23 June 2022
Abstract
Modeling of hypersonic aerothermodynamics in non-equilibrium flow is a challenging problem of aircraft design. Especially, prediction of atmospheric reentry and other planet’s entry heat loads are significant for aerospace vehicle design engineers. Therefore, accurate calculation of heat flux of leading edges and nose tips are the main concerns of thermal design engineers. The present study aims to simulate hypersonic entry conditions of Mars and Earth for the Mars Pathfinder experimental capsule with using SU2 Non-Equilibrium MOdeling (NEMO) solver, which is the recent enhanced version of SU2 Multiphysics software to model reacting flows in thermochemical nonequilibrium. The solver is coupled with Mutation++ (Multicomponent Thermodynamic and Transport properties for IONized gases in C++) library that provides the needed thermochemical properties of the air and carbon dioxide mixture chemistry models. Five species air model is used for air and eight species carbon dioxide mixture model is used for modeling Mars atmosphere. Axisymmetrical model is used for the accurate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis and boundary conditions are taken from experimental study of Hollis. Turbulence is not modeled since the physics of the flow can be approximated as laminar under the defined conditions. Both atmospheric reentry and Mars entry are modeled, and accurate modeling effects of species dissociation is investigated. Results show that the surface heat flux distribution agreed with the experimental data and species dissociation has comparable behavior with previous studies. This work illustrates that SU2-NEMO open source CFD solver is capable of modeling hypersonic flows of different mixtures in thermochemical non-equilibrium, including atmospheric reentry and Mars entry.
Keywords: nonequilibrium flows, hypersonic flows, aerothermodynamics, computational fluid dynamics