by Grant Palmer

June 26, 2000

The Reacting Flow Environments Branch (ASA) and the Thermal Protection Branch (ASM) are both in the Space Technology Division (AS). ASA is primarily involved with developing and applying analysis tools to compute the environments around aerospace vehicles, CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics), engineering tools, and so on. We also have an experimental program that mostly works to provide experimental data to validate the computational tools. ASM is primarily involved in the testing and design of thermal protection system (TPS) materials. They also do some material development work.

The way we usually work together on a project is that ASA provides the environments a spacecraft will experience to the TPS designers over in ASM. The ASM people use our data to evaluate their design. We generally compute the environments from the surface of the vehicle outwards. They take our results as a boundary condition and compute the thermal environment from the surface of the material inward. Here is a real-life example of ASA and ASM working together:

NASA Ames was given the task of designing the thermal protection system for the nose cap and wing leading edge for the X-34 vehicle. The X-34 is a space plane that will demonstrate future technologies. The TSP designers in ASM wanted to use a material called SIRCA, which had never been used on this type of vehicle. Therefore, they needed to perform a lot of analysis beforehand to determine if it was going to be strong enough and temperature resistant enough to do the job. The engineers in ASA computed surface temperature, pressure, and heat transfer rate at key points along the trajectory the vehicle would fly. The ASM designers used this data to perform an in-depth thermal and stress analysis of the TPS material to confirm their design.

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