Conveners
Ablation and material response
- Eddy Constant (R.Tech)
- Jean Lachaud (University of Bordeaux)
Ablation and material response
- Gregory Pinaud (ArianeGroup)
- Timothy Minton (University of Colorado Boulder)
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Mr Gabriel Merlaud (Université de Bordeaux)18/06/2026, 09:00Ablation and material responsePresentation
Tightly coupled simulations between ablative materials and hypersonic flow solvers are essential for reliable demise-oriented design. The traditional use of B′ tables to couple material response and flow behavior was an effective strategy to address the computational limitations of the 1960s, but it remains limited in both accuracy and flexibility. This work proposes a generic coupling...
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Savio Poovathingal (University of Kentucky)18/06/2026, 09:18Ablation and material responsePresentation
Charring ablators protect spacecraft by coupling low thermal conductivity and endothermic pyrolysis with porous outgassing to produce transpiration cooling. This work establishes an end-to-end multiscale modeling framework for these TPS materials. At the pore scale, we performed detailed DSMC simulations of high-temperature rarefied gas flow through reconstructed fibrous preform geometries....
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Quentin Taupin (CNES - IRAP - LATMOS)18/06/2026, 09:36Ablation and material responsePresentation
Over the last twenty years, space activities have expanded rapidly, marked by a threefold increase in launch rates and a thirtyfold increase in the number of satellites deployed (Taupin et al., 2025). In 2025, the mass of anthropogenic material re-entering the atmosphere was estimated to represent between 10% and 32% of the natural cosmic influx, with aluminum contributions alone exceeding...
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Timothy Minton (University of Colorado Boulder)18/06/2026, 09:54Ablation and material responsePresentation
An end-of-life scenario for the demise of a LEO satellite might start with deceleration from drag, followed by heating, ablation, and breakup as the satellite descends into the dense atmosphere. Some key physical and chemical processes would be gas-surface energy transfer, ablation reactions on high-temperature surfaces, and pyrolysis of polymeric materials. We have used molecular beam methods...
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Pedro Jorge (University of Colorado Boulder)18/06/2026, 10:12Ablation and material responsePresentation
Spacecraft end-of-life mitigation strategies are increasingly important to tackle the space debris problem. Among these, drag-driven de-orbiting solutions such as deployable drag sails rely on increasing aerodynamic drag to accelerate orbital decay. Alternatively, operating satellites in very low Earth orbit (VLEO) offer a passive de-orbiting approach, where the denser atmosphere rapidly leads...
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Dominik Kuenstler (High Enthalpy Flow Diagnostics Group (HEFDiG), Institute of Space Systems (IRS), University of Stuttgart)18/06/2026, 10:50Ablation and material responsePresentation
There is a substantial lack of knowledge about the environmental effects to the upper atmosphere by the continuously increasing number of satellites that are brought to re-entry after operation. The main constituent of satellite structures is aluminum. Aluminum is injected into the Earth’s atmosphere as a rather new element, as it is only a minor constituent in micrometeorites [1]. However,...
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Tom Schwartzentruber (University of Minnesota)18/06/2026, 11:08Ablation and material responsePresentation
Reentry spacecraft experience extreme heating and surface chemistry that heatshield materials must withstand or that can lead to the demise of spacecraft materials and release of product species into the atmosphere. A common assumption made in such analysis is equilibrium surface chemistry. While this may be accurate for carbon recession rates under certain conditions, it does not accurately...
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Alexandre Martin (University of Kentucky)18/06/2026, 11:26Ablation and material responsePresentation
Accurate prediction of spacecraft demise during atmospheric re-entry requires tightly coupled modeling of aerothermal loading, material response, and structural failure. This work presents the capability of the Kentucky Aerothermal and Thermal-response Solver framework (KATS) to address this challenge through an integrated, multi-physics approach. The methodology combines KATS-FD for flowfield...
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Dr Benton Greene (NASA ODPO (JETS-II Contract))18/06/2026, 11:44Ablation and material responsePresentation
In NASA’s Object Reentry Survival Analysis Tool (ORSAT), aerodynamic drag and aerothermal heating coefficients are computed for each of the free-molecular, continuum, and transitional flow regimes using analytical and semi-analytical methods. These heating coefficients were derived for typical metallic materials that melt and do not have a strong gas-phase contribution to the flow in the...
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Céline Baranger (CEA)18/06/2026, 12:02Ablation and material responsePresentation
During atmospheric hypersonic re-entry, the heat distribution within the thermal protection system (TPS) is dampened by the in-depth chemical degradation of materials - called pyrolysis -, and by a surface physico-chemical degradation - called ablation. The aim of this work is to enhance pyrolysis modeling by considering solid deformations in order to describe more accurately the solid...
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