Kinetic Simulation of Rarefied and Weakly Ionized Hypersonic Flow Fields.

Abstract

When a vehicle enters the Earth's atmosphere at the very large velocities associated with Lunar and Mars return, a strong bow shock is formed in front of the vehicle. The shock heats the air to very high temperatures, causing collisions that are sufficiently energetic to produce ionized particles. As a result, a weakly ionized plasma is formed in the region between the bow shock and the vehicle surface. The presence of this plasma impedes the transport of radio frequency waves to the vehicle, causing the phenomenon known as "communications black out". The plasma also interacts with the neutral particles in the flow field, and contributes to the heat flux at the vehicle surface. Since it is difficult to characterize these flow fields using flight or ground based experiments, computational tools play an important role in the design of reentry vehicles. It is important to include the physical phenomena associated with the presence of the plasma in the computational analysis of the flow fields about these vehicles.

Physical models for the plasma phenomena are investigated using a state of the art, Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) code. Models for collisions between charged particles, plasma chemistry, and the self-induced electric field that currently exist in the literature are implemented. Using these baseline models, steady state flow field solutions are computed for the FIRE II reentry vehicle at two different trajectory points.

The accuracy of each baseline plasma model is assessed in a systematic fashion, using one flight condition of the FIRE II vehicle as the test case. Experimental collision cross section data is implemented to model collisions of electrons with neutral particles. Theoretical and experimental reaction cross section data are implemented to model chemical reactions that involve electron impact, and an associative ionization reaction. One-dimensional Particle-In-Cell (PIC) routines are developed and coupled to the DSMC code, to assess the limitations of the baseline electric field model. Interpretation of the DSMC-PIC results leads to the development of an improved electric field model that does not require the substantial computational resources needed to obtain DSMC-PIC solutions.