Marco Panesi
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Understanding non-equilibrium chemical kinetics and its interaction with radiation and fluid mechanics in hypersonic flows remains one of the largest obstacles to the design of light and efficient thermal protection systems for spacecraft. Recent studies identified non-equilibrium radiation as the dominant contributor to after body heating. The prediction of these heating rates is affected by significant uncertainty, which unnecessarily increases the weight of the spacecraft at the expense of scientific payload and aerodynamic stability. The objective of this work is to devise a framework for the construction of reduced order models for chemical kinetics and radiation, relevant to Mars entry applications, based on an adaptive coarse-grained method. The model will enable the description of the strong non-equilibrium kinetics and radiation generated by the recombination of CO2 molecules in the back shell region of entry spacecraft, without the usual reliance on case-specific empiricism.
