A coupled ablation approach using icarus and us3d

A novel approach for modeling hypersonic flow fields and material response in a coupled manner is developed and demonstrated in this work. The procedure leverages modern programming techniques such as application programming interface to create minimally intrusive pathways of communication between solvers while tightly coupling physics of both domains. With the intent of capturing the multi-physical nature of reentry problems, three main capabilities are developed: conjugate heat transfer methodology between US3D (flow solver) and Icarus (material response solver); implementation of a high-fidelity air-carbon ablation model for modeling gas-surface interactions; and a robust mesh motion algorithm to capture both solid and fluid domain deformations due to ablation. A demonstration of this development is presented on an ablating blunt cone geometry.