Development of a Material Response Solver for Charring Ablative Materials

Development of a solver in order to estimate the material response of charring ablative materials which are utilized as thermal protection systems in space vehicles is presented. First, the governing equations for modeling transient thermal response of charring ablative materials and the adopted numerical solution schemes are reviewed. The governing equations include energy balance, pyrolysis kinetics and mass balance. Solution of the governing equations in conjunction with appropriate boundary conditions gives the thermal response of the ablative material. Equations are discretized using vertex-centered finite volume method and solved in a loosely coupled sequential way. Verification studies showed that the results of the developed code are in good agreement with those in the references.