Aerothermal/Ablation Analysis of a Projectile in High Speed Flow Conditions

This paper will present the results of a study that was performed to predict the aerothermal heating and ablation of the nose of a projectile traveling at a speed of Mach 6 using Fluent and Ideas-TMG.

The approach used relies on decoupling the CFD solution from the thermal solution by using 2 distinct solvers. CFD solutions are performed to provide the pressure, velocity fields and heating fluxes around the projectile. These fluxes are in turn mapped to the projectile in TMG and used as boundary conditions for a time step. The TMG solutions yields new wall temperatures and a new nose shape. This information is mapped back to the CFD solver by TMG and is used as a wall temperature boundary conditions to get heat fluxes for the next time step. This process is repeated for a discrete number of time steps over the initial part of the flight, where the temperature increase of the projectile, changes in the heat flux distribution and nose recession are most important.

The paper will describe the CFD and thermal analysis performed and the process used to march in time and pass boundary conditions between the solvers. The new ablation and mapping capabilities that were developed in TMG for this project will also be presented.