Heat flux duplication between ground facility and hypersonic flight

The development of reentry space vehicles requires a precise qualification of their thermal protection system materials. The material catalytic properties should be determined for test conditions relevant to the real flight mission program. However, perfect reproduction of the flight environment in a ground facility is practically impossible for reacting flows and one is obliged to resort to a partial simulation. In an attempt to overcome such an issue, we present a methodology that allows establishing under which hypothesis and approximations the flowfield inside a ground facility is equivalent, regarding the heat flux load, to the real flowfield experienced by a space vehicle. The analytical results of the theory are compared with numerical predictions and agree favorably with them.