Fast Thermal Calculations for Responsive Targets in Support of Real-Time Scene Generation

In order to provide the required simulation frame rates we propose to decouple the incident flux calculations from a simple thermal response model. We propose to develop a table-lookup methodology based on high fidelity precomputed environmental and eventually aerothermal fluxes which can be draw in real time to drive the thermal response model. A simple 1-D thermal calculation based on an analytic solution will provide a fast thermal computation based on the flux conditions and previous surface temperature. This approach will fit natively within the existing simulation framework and allow full closed-loop simulation of the thermal history of even highly thermally responsive targets throughout midcourse and upper re-entry.