Ablation Modeling of Ares-I Upper State Thermal Protection System Using Thermal Desktop

The thermal protection system (TPS) for the Ares-I Upper Stage will be based on Space Transportation System External Tank (ET) and Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) heritage materials. These TPS materials were qualified via hot gas testing that simulated ascent and re-entry aerothermodynamic convective heating environments. From this data, the recession rates due to ablation were characterized and used in thermal modeling for sizing the thickness required to maintain structural substrate temperatures. At Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), the in-house code ABL is currently used to predict TPS ablation and substrate temperatures as a FORTRAN application integrated within SINDA/G. This paper describes a comparison of the new ablation utility in Thermal Desktop and SINDA/FLUINT with the heritage ABL code and empirical test data which serves as the validation of the Thermal Desktop software for use on the design of the Ares-I Upper Stage project.