Accurate Hybrid Flowfield Approaches for High Altitude Maneuverability

Army defense technologies for high speed threat intercept increasingly rely on vehicle maneuverability through both aerodynamic and thrust augmentation. Similarly, threats have relied on equally maneuvering defenses to avoid intercept. Thus, it is in the interest of any defense system to target the threat at any point in the battlespace where it is most vulnerable, potentially resulting in intercepts at higher-altitude, more rarefied regimes. Furthermore, gas-particle interactions, ablation, ionization, and chemical kinetics can all have a first order effect on aero-optical, hot parts, and radar signature observables used for threat identification and targeting. Hence, the rapid development of defense technologies to meet these demands relies on accurate modeling tools that must consider the increasingly complex, multi-disciplinary nature of the design problem. The present effort extends our Phase I work leveraging our existing multi-disciplinary, multi-physics, unsteady, hybrid continuum/rarefied simulation tools to accurately predict aerodynamic/thrust augmented maneuvering forces, vehicle/exhaust plume flowfields, and observable signatures for configurations that occur at altitudes where both continuum and rarefied physics must be modeled. Attention is to be placed in improving computational efficiency, robustness, hybrid interfacing, and practicality, and includes efforts to integrate tools within existing simulation pipelines to facilitate adoption (commercialization) within the defense simulation community.