CFD Simulation of Aerothermal Heating of Sounding Rocket Hull Segments

The QUANTUS consortium started activities to perform atom interferometry on a sounding rocket in the year 2011. Three sounding rocket missions (MAIUS-1 to 3) have been planned to demonstrate Bose-Einstein condensation and atom interferometry with rubidium and potassium atoms. Two different payloads MAIUS-A and MAIUS-B are being designed, qualified and integrated into the time frame from 2011 until 2020. The MAIUS-A scientific payload demonstrated the first Bose-Einstein Condensates in Space in the challenging environment aboard a two-staged VSB-30 sounding rocket on the 23rd of January 2017. The experiment designed to achieve this ambitious scientific goal used various sensitive instruments imposing strong requirements on the thermal and mechanical design of the scientific payload. The paper gives a summary of the MAIUS-A scientific payload design and the thermal requirements, that motivated this work. This paper presents a CFD simulation used to determine the heat flux into the hull segments of the MAIUS-A payload by aerothermal heating and compare the results with measurements obtained from temperature sensors aboard the MAIUS-A payload. Accurate heat flux information is essential to design the thermal control system of the MAIUS-B payload. The velocity of the MAIUS-1 vehicle ranged from 0 – 2000 m/s (0 – 7 Mach) and it reached an apogee of 252 km. The fluid parameters change significantly over time as the rocket passes different layers of Earth atmosphere. A MATLAB script is used to calculate the applicable fluid parameters using the DIN ISO 2533 standard atmosphere model. This paper describes the simulation setup to include these fluid parameters into the CFD simulation . Furthermore, it illustrates the geometry model of both the solid and the fluid domain as well as the mesh and boundary conditions used for the CFD simulation. Keywords Sounding