Influence of Park's Two-Temperature Model Control Temperature on the Flow Properties in Hypersonic Reentry Conditions

Numerical simulations of reactive hypersonic flows under thermochemical non-equilibrium conditions are presented for the FIRE II and Mars Pathfinder capsules. An 11-species chemical model is employed to simulate Earth's atmosphere, while an 8-species chemical model simulates Mars' atmosphere. The current formulation uses Park's two-temperature model to account for the non-equilibrium phenomena. The present work analyzes the impact of different sets of weight factors used in Park's model to calculate the control temperature. The code used to simulate the hypersonic flow addressed in this work solves the Navier-Stokes equations for reacting gas flows. The findings are presented in terms of the Mach number, temperature modes, and mass fraction distributions along the stagnation streamline in a region closer to the shock wave. The study also includes results regarding the stagnation point convective heat flux. The results presented are encouraging and show that the weight factors significantly impact the FIRE II test cases while having little impact on the Mars Pathfinder flows. In all cases, it is possible to observe some effect of the weight factor selection on property distributions. In summary, the weight factors influence the flow behavior with varying intensities depending on the flow conditions.