Plasma Preheating Technology for Ablation Studies of Hypersonic Reentry Vehicles

Abstract

Measurements of mass ablation rates in hypersonic flows are used to calibrate computational models. A novel plasma technique for preheating axisymmetric samples of heatshield materials has been developed and applied to ablation of graphite sample through this work. The experimental probe was very similar to the European standard probe, normal to the flow. The Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) was used to examine the surface characteristics; and the experiments show a significant spatial variation in thickness loss for the graphite test material over the disc radius though the spatial variation was still largely axisymmetric. The present work does support reasonable contributions to reentries and can further be developed to validate computational models under conditions that replicate characteristics of reentry flights.