Thermophysical Aspects of Re-Entry Flows

During the past decade, much focus for research and development in re-entry flows has been centered on the Shuttle program and the Jupiter atmosphere entry probe. Boundaries of this research area are expanding rapidly by new advanced applications such as: aeroassisted orbital transfer vehicles (AOTV) that achieve payload economy by passing through the Earth's upper atmosphere to change orbit, transatmospheric vehicles (TAV) that take off from Earth or a conventional aircraft to enter near-Earth orbit, then re-enter the atmosphere with cross-range capability to land on an airstrip, hypersonic aircraft anticipated to require propulsion by supersonic combustion ramjets, and the Strategic Defense Initiative that potentially involves hypersonic flow phenomena such as associated with signal discrimination. Together, these new applications encompass a broad range of the disciplines common to thermophysics.

The present volume is organized into four chapters that highlight recent progress in the following areas of re-entry research: low-density phenomena at hypersonic flow conditions, high temperature kinetics and transport properties, aerothermal ground simulation and measurements, and numerical simulations of hypersonic flows. The papers were selected from the thermophysics sessions at the AIAA 23rd Aerospace Sciences Meeting in Reno, NV, in January 1985, and the AIAA 20th Thermophysics Conference in Williamsburg, VA, in June 1985. They have been reviewed, revised, and updated for this volume.