Simulation of thermal ablation process using ANSYS software

Abstract

An ablation process during the Pyrolysis of an insulating layer used in a thermal protection system is simulated using the commercial software ANSYS in the present work. Two different methods are proposed and established for mutual validation. Both the methods estimate the ablation by successive eliminations of the regions exposed to melting point temperature from a transient thermal analysis with suggested mesh quality and time increments satisfying the convergence of results. Two-dimensional plane models are solved and the effect of burning time and load pattern on ablation is analyzed. The proposed methodology can be used to predict the thermal ablation in thermal protection systems of various space applications.