Design of Ablative Liners for High Heat and Erosive Conditions

Abstract

This paper presents an analytical approach to predict the thermal response of charring and noncharring ablative liners exposed to high heat and erosive conditions. A one-dimensional transient thermal model has been developed, which forms the basis of a computer code to predict the temperature distribution in the liner, the amount of char and erosion, and the liner thickness required to satisfy a given design criterion. The accuracy of the model was evaluated by comparing the predicted and the experimental results available for the carbon-phenolic and the graphite liners, which showed a good agreement to each other.