Application #44. Mach 24 Temperature-Based Adaptation of Space Shuttle Configuration in Chemical Nonequilibrium

Contributed by Peter Gnoffo, NASA Langley

Temperature contours and grid for simulation of STS 2 at Mach 24 using a 5-species model for air.

These images show the solution on initial grid and on a grid adapted to temperature gradients. The baseline grid was created blindly; no attempt has been made to generate an excellent initial grid. Instead, the long-term goal is to quickly generate a reasonable starting grid, then to adapt using discrete adjoint information to arrive at a grid-converged result. The demonstration adaptation shown here has been performed with a simple mesh movement scheme embedded in the flow solution algorithm and does not incorporate FUN3D’s distributed coarsening/enrichment/smoothing/swapping algorithms.