Mesh tailoring for strongly coupled computation of ablative material in nonequilibrium hypersonic flow

A one-dimensional material response implicit solver with surface ablation and pyrolysis is strongly coupled to LeMANS, a CFD code for the simulation of weakly ionized hypersonic flows in thermo-chemical non-equilibrium. Using blowing wall boundary conditions and a moving mesh algorithm, the results of a strongly coupled solution of a sample re-entry problem are presented. Because of the requirement of a coupling scheme, an Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) approach is used to compute the flux, allowing the mesh to move as the surface ablates. However, as the shape of the vehicle changes, the shock location and geometry are also modified. Using the moving mesh capabilities of the flow solver, a mesh tailoring algorithm is presented, and results obtained with this new functionality are compared to un-tailored mesh results.