A Hypersonic Environment Analysis Tool (HEAT)

Aeroheating friction and atmospheric particulate encounter on high speed projectiles results in material loss on nosecones and control surfaces impacting flight stability performance. The speed requirement for modern projectiles is too extreme for ground testing to help fully understand the physics of this phenomenon. Modeling and simulation of the aerothermodynamic and weather environment is critical in extrapolating ground test procedures to the flight environment. The existing legacy codes for this purpose have numerous limitations for several industry and government users including the Aviation and Missile Research Development and Engineering Center (AMRDEC). These limitations are now impacting missions and programs such as the Mission Planning and Analysis System (MPAS) modernization and conventional prompt strike (CPS) development. Issues such as lack of support for surface mesh based geometries, difficulties in defining complex geometries, and lack of interfaces to third party libraries and capabilities are hindering rapid evaluation of new mission plans and trajectories for both new and mature missile configurations. To address this need, CFDRC proposes to develop a government owned, contractor maintained, open source Hypersonic Environment Analysis Tool (HEAT) for surface grid based geometries for supersonic and hypersonic flight regimes with support for interfaces to trajectory analysis, ablation and weather effects.