Short Duration, High Altitude, Mixed Continuum/Non-Continuum Flowfield

The increasing sophistication of missile defense technologies has resulted in the equally increasing sophistication of defense mitigating technologies. Whereas first generation systems concentrated on early detection, early boost phase, and/or terminal phase intercepts (i.e. low-altitudes), the current paradigm is to create systems that address all areas of the threat trajectory, increasingly in the high altitude late-boost and mid-course phases. Within these high-altitude phases, unique transient propulsive events can occur, such as staging, thrust termination, maneuvering, and detonation. Other more benign transient events, such as debris field discrimination, can also occur. Consequently, any attempt to simulate these phenomena for system identification, targeting, and/or discrimination have to take into account the transient and continuum/rarefied nature of the flow. Adding to this complexity, gas-particle interactions and chemical kinetic effects need to be included for accurate modeling. The problem to be addressed within the present effort is the accurate modeling of high altitude transient phenomena associated with short duration propulsive and/or detonative events that contain both continuum and rarefied regions while taking into account all the aforementioned modeling concerns and leveraging our existing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) technologies to minimize development effort.