SPECTRAL SCIENCES, INC — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: N23A-T026

Description

Hypersonic vehicles require thermal protection systems (TPS) for protection from high temperature, strongly shocked air. Carbon-based ablative TPS have received particular attention for Navy applications. Physics-based models of gas–material interactions are needed for hypersonic vehicle design, since ground-based testing at flight-like conditions is limited and costly. In the proposed effort, Spectral Sciences, Inc., with academic partner University of Colorado, will develop innovative software to model carbon ablation with finite-rate chemistry and mesoscale material physics in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) workflows. The new software, called FARSITE (Feature-aware Ablation and Reaction SImulator for Thermal Extremes), will be a plugin for the US3D hypersonic CFD code. The Phase I effort will demonstrate feasibility of extensions to a state-of-the-art finite-rate ablation model that are informed by new experimental data and integrated into the CFD solver. Later-Phase efforts will implement additional, advanced models of molecular and mesoscale ablation processes, guided by comprehensive experimental validation campaigns on Navy-relevant materials such as 2D and 3D carbon–carbon. FARSITE will meet critical Government and commercial needs to understand and manage gas–material interactions in extreme thermal environments.