IXV post-flight reconstruction and analysis of the aerothermodynamic measurements along the rarefied portion of the reentry trajectory

Abstract

Following the reentry of the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle in 2015, a lot of efforts were carried out at the ONERA for the post-flight analysis and the reconstruction of the heat flux applied to the vehicle. This flight represents a unique means of validation of the computational tools employed for the design of such mission. The aim of this paper is to exploit for the first time these data in the rarefied portion of the vehicle’s reentry. In this context, DSMC simulations were performed between 115 and 90 km and a CFD computation was made for the 90 km flight point. In the standard numerical conditions, different degrees of agreement are obtained and a sensitivity analysis to various numerical and atmospheric parameters provides several ways to significantly improve the results. In addition, the DSMC and CFD comparison provides a good agreement for the surface quantities and suggestions to reach a better level of consistency between both methods and the flight data are finally discussed.