Effects of electronic excitation on hypersonic ablation

Authors:
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The high temperatures present in hypersonic flows produce a non-negligible amount of electronically excited states in NO, N2, CN, and C2, where the carbon-containing species are produced from ablation of a carbon vehicle's surface. The inclusion of electronically excited states in a chemical kinetics scheme will change the properties of the gas, for which the scheme is being modeled. In this work, we developed Ablative Solver for High Eenthalpy Nonequilibrium, a finite-rate chemical kinetics library for gas–material reactions and electronic excitation within two-temperature computational fluid dynamics solver Hy2Foam, to calculate the changes to the population distributions and surface properties of the hypersonic flow. The model considers chemical and thermal non-equilibrium, ablative material response to surface heating and reactions, and electronic excitation of gas-phase species of a reentry flow for the first time. We show in a number of different hypersonic cases that when these excited states exist in the gas phase, population distributions of both carbon-containing, air, and charged species, as well as mass blowing rates, change significantly. For a case at Mach 24 using an augmented air–carbon-ablation model of gas–material interaction, the mass blowing rate changes by up to 5%, and for Mach 8, the mass blowing rate changes by up to 10%.
Funding Information
  • Office of Naval Research Global (N00014-23-1-2458)

This publication has 35 references indexed in Scilit: