Flight Extrapolation of Plasma Wind Tunnel Stagnation Region Flowfield

Development of reusable space vehicles requires a precise qualification of their thermal protection system materials. The catalytic properties are usually determined in plasma wind tunnels for test conditions relevant to the flight mission program. Therefore, for such a situation, it is important to have a methodology that allows the correct extrapolation of the ground test conditions to the real flight ones and vice-versa. The local heat transfer simulation concept presented in this paper is a possible strategy for accomplishing this task. Computational results show that the ground test conditions are indeed correctly extrapolated to the flight ones and a simple method of accounting for possible discrepancies between the two configurations is presented.