Preliminary Validation of Fluid-Structure Interaction Modeling for Hypersonic Deployable Re-Entry Systems

The aim of the present work is to provide a first attempt to set an aero-thermo-elastic methodology for deployable atmospheric re-entry decelerators operating at high Mach number and high dynamic pressure. Because of the severity of re-entry conditions such as high temperatures, high pressures and high velocities, the behavior of their flexible structures is a hard target to assess. In this paper a partitioned Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) approach based on the integration of different commercial software (STAR-CCM+ and ABAQUS) is presented. In order to validate the specific codes and the overall strategy for structural and fluid dynamics analyses of flexible structures, different test cases are considered, including numerical and experimental literature results related to the problem under investigation. The paper shows that a good description of the physical behavior is possible with the proposed FSI partitioned approach. The model is preliminarily applied to investigate structural, fluid dynamic and aero-thermal behavior of a flexible deployable umbrella-like configuration along a typical suborbital re-entry trajectory based on sounding rocket.