A Computational Study of Plume Modeling for Space Launch System Abort Scenarios

A series of viscous CFD simulations depicting Space Launch System (SLS) post Mode-1abort scenarios are conducted and analyzed. The primary purpose of these simulations is to study the effect of launch abort vehicle attitude control motor (ACM) and abort motor(AM) plume modeling fidelity on the drag of the aborted core stage. The simulations are first conducted with a fully-coupled, multi-species and chemically reacting model for the freestream gases and the solid rocket abort motor combustion products. Following this, equivalent species are created for the ACM and AM exhaust gases. These equivalent species aim to provide near the same results for core stage drag as the chemically reacting model at a significantly lower computational cost. Finally, the exhaust gases are modeled as calorically perfect air. It was concluded that under most scenarios, both the equivalent species and the perfect air models predict the drag of the aborted core stage sufficiently close to that predicted by the chemically reacting simulations. In these cases, the flow and geometry conditions did not induce significant changes in the composition of the ‘true’ exhaust gas via afterburning of the combustion products. For cases where this was not the case, the properties of the essentially frozen equivalent species and perfect air models deviated from the true mixture, yielding unsatisfactory results. Finally, the accuracy improvements by using the chemically reacting model are weighed against the significant increase in associated computational costs. It was found that the simplified exhaust gas models are at least 4 times less expensive than the chemically reacting model. This may justify the judicious use of these simple models in future work.