3D Mesh Displacement Strategy to Simulate the Thermal Degradation of Materials under Atmospheric Reentry Conditions

A three-dimensional strategy to compute mesh displacement following surface recession due to ablation is proposed and implemented in the finite volume material response code MoDeTheC. Due to the application to the thermal degradation of space debris during atmospheric reentry, the strategy developed is based onto a very general formulation that can deal with any mesh topology and object shape without preliminary identification of ablated surfaces. First, a new moving mesh method modifies the grid to take into account changes due to ablation. Subsequently, a shape preservation mesh balancing method redistributes the mesh vertices to maintain the grid quality. Finally, a smoothing algorithm is applied to prevent high frequency mesh oscillations. The new 3D mesh displacement strategy is verified on many 2D and 3D test cases to prove the capabilities of the method.