Integrated Modeling Method for Severe Ablation in Hypersonic Vehicles with Adaptive Mesh Update

Abstract

In the research of hypersonic vehicles, the ablative thermal protection system plays an essential role in shielding the vehicle from extreme aerodynamic heating during high-speed flight. One of the most significant challenges in the design and testing of these systems is the modeling of the ablation behavior. Particularly in situations with severe wall recessions, the degradation of computational accuracy due to the mesh distortion, which stands for a poor spatial discretization of the calculation domain, remains a significant issue that has yet to be effectively resolved. In this paper, a novel integrated modeling method for the ablation caused by aerodynamic heating is proposed, incorporating efficient engineering algorithms to simulate the aerothermodynamic parameters. In addition, an adaptive mesh update algorithm is proposed to maintain high-quality meshes under severe ablation. The redundant mesh is first deleted in a layer-by-layer fashion, followed by controlled mesh deformation based on the radial basis function (RBF), which is a distance-based interpolation or fitting method to adjust the remaining mesh with the postablation domain. Throughout this process, the proposed method could not only effectively preserve the overall quality of the mesh but also achieve significant advancements in the accurate representation of the ablation morphology. A series of numerical examples demonstrates that the proposed method exhibits remarkable stability in generating mesh grids and a high capability for accurately capturing the ablation morphology in the modeling of complex ablation problems.