Aerothermodynamics of Blunt Body Entry Vehicles

In this chapter, the aerothermodynamic phenomena of blunt body entry vehicles are discussed. Four topics will be considered that present challenges to current computational modeling techniques for blunt body environments: turbulent flow, non-equilibrium flow, rarefied flow, and radiation transport. Examples of comparisons between computational tools to ground and flight-test data will be presented in order to illustrate the challenges existing in the numerical modeling of each of these phenomena and to provide test cases for evaluation of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code predictions.