Debris Transport Modeling Techniques on Launch Vehicle Systems

Abstract

Methods employed to model debris transport for the Ares I launch vehicle are presented. Two methods were implemented during the early development cycle. The first method uses high fidelity CFD with dynamic mesh chimera capabilities. At the early stage of the Ares development, this technique proved it could not address the time constraints needed by the designers. The second approach uses the NASA debris tracking program, which simulates thousands of debris trajectories in a matter of minutes on a standard workstation. The NASA debris code has both three degree of freedom (3-DOF) and six degree of freedom (6DOF) models. Multiple solutions are presented for debris transport on the Ares I vehicle. The solutions are obtained using the NASA debris tracking program with a comparison to a fully viscous chimera unstructured CFD solver. Comparisons are made between the NASA code and the chimera unstructured solver prediction. In addition, comparisons are made between the 3-DOF and 6-DOF models in the NASA code.