Nonequilibrium radiative heating prediction method for aeroassist flowfields with coupling to flowfield solvers

A method for predicting radiation absorption and emission coefficients in thermochemical nonequilibrium flows is developed. The method is called LORAN (Langley Optimized RAdiative Nonequilibrium code). It applies the smeared band approximation for molecular radiation to produce moderately detailed results and is intended to fill the gap between detailed but costly prediction methods, and very fast but highly approximate methods. The optimization of the method to provide efficient solutions allowing coupling to flow field solvers is discussed. Representative results are obtained and compared to previous nonequilibrium radiation methods, as well as to ground and flight measured data. Reasonable agreement is found in all cases. A multidimensional radiative transport method is also developed for axisymmetric flows. Its predictions for wall radiative flux are 20 to 25 pct. lower than those of the tangent slab transport method, as expected. The method was applied to the peak heating condition of the Aeroassist Flight Experiment (AFE) trajectory, with results comparable to predictions from other methods. The LORAN method was also applied in conjunction with the CFD code, LAURA, to study the sensitivity of the radiative heating prediction to various models used in nonequilibrium CFD.