Computational Investigation of the Effects of Chemistry on Mars Retropropulsion Environments

The effects of real-gas chemistry on a human-scale Mars lander concept are evaluated using scale-resolving computational fluid dynamics. Ground testing of such vehicle concepts requires significant compromises on physical scale, instrumentation, configuration, and environments. The effects of real-gas chemistry are often neglected due to constraints on test articles and facilities; most experiments use inert simulant gases at low temperatures. Instead, a strong reliance on high-fidelity computational analyses is required to expand the understanding of retropropulsion aerodynamics. In this work, simulations are performed on thousands of Graphics Processing Units using the Summit system available at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, resulting in game-changing computational performance. An overview of the computational approach is presented and results are compared with those obtained in a previous perfect gas campaign.