Development and Validation of a Material Response Model for Ablative Materials Undergoing Ground Testing

Material response (MR) modeling is critical to understanding and predicting the behavior of thermal protection systems (TPS) materials. It is also critical to the design of novel TPS materials. Developing an accurate MR model can be a complex, expensive, and time-consuming process. This paper details the development of a MR model of an Oxy-Acetylene Test Bed (OTB) system. 1dFIAT (One-Dimensional Fully Implicit Ablation and Thermal response program) was used to develop the MR model. Surface thermochemistry was generated using two different programs to create B-prime tables for the MR model. A model ablative material, Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator (PICA), was evaluated at 5 different heat fluxes on the OTB. A sensitivity analysis of 1dFIAT was then performed to investigate the parameters that were contributing most to the error between the predicted and experimental values. A combination of material properties and environmental properties were measured and calculated to fulfill the required inputs to the MR model. The accuracy of the MR model was validated against the OTB experimental results for the PICA material. Learnings and challenges associated with the creation of the numerical model using this method and future applications of this approach are also discussed.