Ablation, Thermal Response, and Chemistry Program for Analysis of Thermal Protection Systems

Abstract

In previous work, the authors documented the Multicomponent Ablation Thermochemistry (MAT) and the Fully Implicit Ablation and Thermal response (FIAT) programs. In this work, key features from MAT and FIAT were combined to create the new Fully Implicit Ablation, Thermal response, and Chemistry (FIATC) program. FIATC is fully compatible with FIAT (version 2.6) but has expanded capabilities to compute the multispecies surface chemistry and ablation rate as part of the surface energy balance. This new methodology eliminates B' tables, provides blown species as a function of time, and enables calculations that would otherwise be impractical (tables with 4 or more independent variables) or impossible (such as stacked pyrolyzing ablators). Equations and solution procedures are presented, then representative calculations of equilibrium and non-equilibrium ablation in flight and ground-test environments are discussed. Nomenclature