Inaugural lecture: Friday April 2nd, 2010 at 15h

Building Q, Auditorium D, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussel

Modelling and simulation of reacting gas mixtures, with application to atmospheric (re-)entry flows and flows in ground testing facilities

During their entry in atmosphere, space (re-)entry vehicles such as manned space transportation vehicles (capsules or winged spacecraft) or planetary probes are exposed to high enthalpy reacting flows and need to be protected against excessive heat fluxes by Thermal Protection Systems. The design of these systems relies on experiments in ground testing facilities and numerical simulations of the flows in these facilities as well as in flight. An accurate modelling of such flows is therefore essential for the proper design of these systems. Modelling and computational issues will be briefly exposed and illustrative applications by the speaker and several PhD graduates will be presented.

Download: Poster (A3), slides

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Other lectures

Multicomponent gas flow modelling

Modelling aspects of multicomponent gas flows, as those encountered in atmospheric (re-)entry flows and in high-enthalpy ground testing facilities but also in combustion problems, will be discussed in detail, in particular the modelling of transport properties and fluxes. First, the basic kinetic framework and the zeroth-order (equilibrium) Maxwellian distributions will be recalled. Then, the asymptotic pertubative (Enskog) expansion approach will be presented and results for the first-order approximation will be derived. A Galerkin approximate solution of the linearized Boltzmann equation involved in the first-order approximation will then be shown to lead to linear systems for transport properties and fluxes, and the solution of these systems will be discussed. Finally, a formulation for flows in (nearly) Local Thermo-chemical Equilibrium will be presented.