CFD Analysis on Mars Entry Vehicle Using a 5-Species Model

In the recent decades, there is an increased interesting on the study of Mars planet. However, there is a big difference between Mars and Earth atmosphere. However, the most recent European de-scent mission on Mars was a total failure. This fiasco can be explained through huge differences between Earth and Mars atmosphere. Firstly, it is a big difference regarding density of these planets’ atmosphere. Secondly, their chemical composition is completely different. For this reason, the INCAS’ researchers have trying to develop a numerical approach capable to give valuable results regarding the Mars’ descent of vehicles to sustain the ESA’ s studies of Mars. This paper is focusing to find a valid numerical approach regarding the vehicles’ descent on Mars. The numerical methodology described in this paper is based on Ansys Fluent solver, which is a very popular commercial CFD code utilized massively by both academic and industrial communities.