Hypersonic Vehicle Analyses: The Needs and Challenges of Multidisciplinary Simulations

I would like to switch gears to discuss three projects involving different types of coupling. The first project involves an ablating Hypersonic vehicle and explores the coupling between hypersonic flow, material response, and radiation from the gas around the vehicle. The motivation for this work is to develop rapid detection approaches for hypersonic vehicles, which present new challenges for protection.

There is a lot of interest in Hypersonics, especially in the military sector, due to the unique challenges they pose for existing radar systems. One approach to detecting hypersonic vehicles is to observe radiation in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. The project focuses on a specific vehicle, the IRV two, and examines the radiation generated during its trajectory, particularly at a high altitude of 55 kilometers and a high speed of just under seven kilometers per second.

The challenge lies in determining the confidence level in the results obtained from complex calculations involving 20 different chemical species and 195 chemical reactions. Uncertainties also arise in material and radiation modeling. The goal of the project is to identify key processes affecting radiation and quantify uncertainties in the calculations.

The approach involves multidisciplinary analysis, with tight coupling between the Flow code LeMANS and the material response code Mo Park. The radiation modeling is weakly coupled for specific reasons. The project aims to assess uncertainties in chemistry and quantify overall uncertainty in the results. This work involves a thorough analysis and understanding of the complex interactions between flow, material response, and radiation.