Coupling CFD and Material Response for Analysis of Mars Entry

In computing the response of an ablating thermal protection system during atmospheric entry, the aerothermal environment and material response are generally computed separately with a blowing correction term in the material response model to account for the blowing of char and pyrolysis gases [1]. In this work, we apply a coupled approach in which pyrolysis blowing gases, computed in the PATO material response code [2], are used with a blowing boundary condition in the DPLR hypersonic CFD code [3]. This leads to an iterative method in which blowing products from PATO are input into DPLR to update surface heating estimates. The full iterative method, with the addition of radiative heating estimates using the NEQAIR radiation solver [4], is shown in Fig. 1. The method is demonstrated on a sphere case with the environment and material properties based on the Mars Science Laboratory entry. Future work includes utilizing this method in computing full 3D material response during the Mars 2020 entry.