Coupled Thermochemical Ablation and Rarefied Particle Erosion during Mars Entry

Abstract

Martian dust particles are a few micrometers in diameter, comparable to the mean free path of the gas in the hypersonic shock layer. Their Knudsen number ranges from approximately 0.2 to 100, placing them in the transitional and free-molecular regimes, whereas the flow around the vehicle is a continuum. The two-way flow-particle coupling previously developed by the authors for a two-temperature thermochemical nonequilibrium flow is extended to a receding and pyrolyzing heat shield surface. The gas-surface interaction and the in-depth material response are solved on separate time scales. The surface balances are exchanged at every flow step, while the in-depth response is coupled implicitly over physical time windows. The flow-material coupling is assessed against graphite arc-jet measurements. The framework is applied to the Schiaparelli trajectory from 50 to 30 km. Three surface chemistry models (equilibrium, Park-5, and Zhluktov-Abe) are compared for fixed geometry, char-induced recession, and combined char ablation and particle erosion. At the final trajectory point, the stagnation point heat flux differs by 30-75% among the chemistry models. For the equilibrium model, surface recession changes this heat flux by less than 1% but lowers wall temperature and increases pyrolysis gas injection. Particle erosion contributes 1.73 mm of stagnation point recession, exceeding the char-induced recession, and more than doubles the total recession for all three models. To the authors' knowledge, this study provides the first quantitative comparison of particle erosion between rarefied and continuum drag correlations, and the continuum correlation underestimates the stagnation point erosion rate by 31-35%.