Assessment of Radiative Heating for Hypersonic Earth Reentry Using Nongray Step Models

Accurate prediction of the aerothermal environment is of great significance to space exploration and return missions. The canonical Fire II trajectory points are simulated to investigate the radiative transfer in the shock layer for Earth reentry at hypervelocity above 10 km/s using a developed radiation–flowfield uncoupling method. The thermochemical nonequilibrium flow is solved by an in-house PHAROS Navier–Stokes code, while the nongray radiation is integrated by the tangent slab approximation, respectively, combined with the two-, five-, and eight-step models. For the convective heating, the present results agree well with the data of Anderson’s relation. For the radiative heating, the two-step model predicts the closest values with the results of Tauber and Sutton’s relationship, while the five- and eight-step models predict far greater. The three-step models all present the same order of magnitude of radiative heating of 1 MW/m² and show a consistent tendency with the engineering estimation. The Planck-mean absorption coefficient is calculated to show the radiative transfer significantly occurs in the shock layer. By performing the steady simulation at each flight trajectory point, the present algorithm using a nongray step model with moderate efficiency and reasonable accuracy is promising to solve the real-time problem in engineering for predicting both convective and radiative heating to the atmospheric reentry vehicle in the future.