Atmosphere Reentry

Planetary atmosphere entry modeling involves challenging flow solutions rich with flow physics and flow-boundary interaction. The protecting vehicle heat shield (TPS) surface evolves with time due to the ablation and mechanical erosion of the TPS material. Shock wave chemistry produces active radicals capable of damaging of the TPS and posing risks to the vehicle integrity.

These conditions pose specific requirements to the computational meshes that often need to resolve the shock wave structure in the same run with local feature modeling at the evolving surface of the TPS.

All these challenges are met with meshing features available in GridPro. Mesh clustering at the artificial surfaces allows for the shock wave capturing while the control net surfaces (splines) are perfect for modeling of the evolving surfaces. Huge variations in the mesh scales when the local features need to be resolved are seamlessly solved with the mesh topology clustering.