Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

Capsule reentry in high atmosphere

The atmosphere reentry of a capsule is simulated in high atmosphere via a fully parallel code running on massive multi-thread platforms. In these flow conditions, rarefied flow models have to be used. We present here a simulation of a capsule reentry: the focus of this example is on dynamic octree-grid refinement as the geometry and the flow change. Adaptation is based on the distance to the geometry and on the temperature gradient. The dynamics of the capsule is taken into account: according to the force exerted by the fluid on the capsule, the geometry rotates around its center of mass up to the stationary position. The simulation is six-dimensional: three space dimensions and three velocity directions. Without parallelism and grid adaptation the simulation would be out of reach.

Figure 5. Capsule reentry dynamics in 3D. Rarefied flow and parallel adaptive grid refinement via Octrees.