Toward Ablative Material Response Coupling in DPLR

The present paper describes preliminary development of an in-depth material response model within NASA’s DPLR software. A complete description of the formulation of a fluid-coupled, ablative material response model is provided. The model accounts for finiterate chemistry and convection of pyrolysis gases through a porous medium. The material response equations are implemented in DPLR to produce a structured solver, which is implemented on a parallel computing platform. An independent coupling interface allows the new DPLR-ARM code to communicate boundary data with DPLR, enabling coupled simulations of fluid and material response. A preliminary demonstration of the feasibility of this approach is presented by analysis of two conduction-only problems: a titanium ballistic range projectile, and a carbon ablator subject to low heat flux in an arc jet. Results of the simulations show that proper characterization of material properties, such as surface emissivity, and the non-isotropy and temperature dependence of thermal conductivity, have a strong influence on the predicted temperature field. Additionally, it is found that the solution is sensitive to frequency of data exchange in the coupling procedure.