Seminars & Events

Leadership Computing Facility
"Validation and Verification Challenges in the Modeling of Atmospheric Reentry Vehicles"

DATE: May 28, 2009 to May 28, 2009
TIME: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
SPEAKER: Dr. Robert D. Moser, Director, Predictive Engiineering and Computational Sciences Center, UT-Austin
LOCATION: Building 221 / Conference Room A216, Argonne National Laboratory

Description:
Vehicles reentering the atmosphere travel at very high velocities, causing extremely high temperature gas flows. The protection of the vehicle from this extreme high-energy environment is critical. A commonly used thermal protection system is an ablative heat shield, as used (for example) in the Apollo program and as planned for NASA's new Orion vehicle. The physical phenomena involved include strong shocks, aerothermochemistry, thermal non-equilibrium, thermal radiation, turbulence and the response of complex materials. Reliable computational models of this system would be of great value in design and operation of reentry vehicles. However, the models of some of these phenomena are known to be unreliable (e.g. turbulence) and others are difficult to parametrize (e.g. aerochemistry). The complexity of the phenomena, the nature of the models and the difficulty of experiments in this high-energy system make verification and validation of computational models challenging.

The Center for Predictive Engineering and Computational Sciences (PECOS) at the University Texas is taking on the challenge of verification and validation in the context of reentry vehicle simulations. In this talk, these challenges are discussed, along with some of our strategies being pursued to address them.

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