Analysis and Ground Test of Aerothermal Effects on Spherical Capsule Geometries

A review is presented of ground test experiments of a 146-mm spherical capsule model with forebody and aftbody symmetry plane measurements of heating and pressure for a range of enthalpies and Reynolds numbers to obtain a dataset of fundamental validation data for CFD codes and to develop a database for design-of-experiment of future studies. Comparisons with laminar experiments are made using CFD demonstrating the influence of thermochemical non-equilibrium on the aerodynamic and aerothermal character of the body. For laminar flows in nitrogen up to 10MJ/kg, the good agreement with available measurements suggests that the description of the chemical and thermal activity of the gas is adequate. Analysis of the forebody heating found that a catalytic recombination probability of 0.002 to 0.010 was required to match the measured heat flux. For laminar flows in air up to 14 MJ/kg, some significant differences between CFD and measurements highlight the inadequacy of the current chemical and thermal models to predict the state of the gas after the rapid expansion in the nozzle. Analysis of forebody heating in these cases found that catalytic recombination probability near 1.0 was required to match measured heat flux, suggesting that potentially some type of excitation may be involved that is not properly modeled. Finally, the non-equilibrium excitation may be collision related as limited evidence suggests that the phenomenon becomes more benign as the number of collisions increases.