Contamination and disturbance analysis from plume impingement of a satellite by using the parallel dsmc code
- Paper number
IAC-06-B5.6.11
- Author
Dr. Kun-Chang Tseng, National Space Organization, Taiwan, China
- Coauthor
Dr. Lee-Her Hu, National Space Organization, Taiwan, China
- Coauthor
Dr. Tien-Chuan Kuo, National Space Organization, Taiwan, China
- Coauthor
Mr. Yun-Min Lee, National Space Organization, Taiwan, China
- Coauthor
Prof. Jong-Shinn Wu, National Space Organization, Taiwan, China
- Year
2006
- Abstract
When satellites flight in a near-vacuum space, the flight directions are controlled by the reaction control system. Owing to the effect of rarefied gas dynamics, the emissive propellant will have backflow effect and has chance to collide with the satellite body. When those highly toxic and erosive propellants, e.g. hydrazine (N2H4) and Flourine (F2), contaminate components of the satellite, it will lead to corrosion, unexpected torque and heat effect which will damage the life of satellite and astronauts. Therefore, analysis of plume impingement and contamination is critical in designing the position, mass flow rate and direction of the attitude determination control subsystem thrusters. Unfortunately, it is very expensive and dangerous to study these phenomena by experiment. Thus, to develop an appropriate numerical method is a good option for studies. A particle-based method, names direct simulation of Monte Carlo (DSMC) method, is proposed by Professor Bird in 1976. It has been numerically proven that the DSMC method can obtain same results as solving the Boltzmann equation. It can be used for many practical applications including the spacecraft re-entry vehicles, the plume impingement from control thrusters on satellite, and the high vacuum technique in material processing, to name a few. However, the drawback is the computational loads are huge for near continuum flow or complicated flows. A general-purpose parallel three-dimensional DSMC code (PDSC), which is developed by Professor Wu’s group, is used in the current study. Several essential functions, including mesh refinement, parallization with dynamic load balancing, chemical reaction, vibrational mode and variable time-step etc., are developed in PDSC to improve the computational efficiency and its ability. In the preliminary results, the PDSC code demonstrates its validation by simulating several benchmarks and comparing with experimental and theoretical results from previous researches. The simulation of the FORMOSAT-3 satellite also shows the plume will impinges to the edges of the solar array and satellite body, which leads to disturbance torque and creates a higher temperature region. In the final manuscript, the parametric studies on various solar array angles, satellite surface temperatures, and thruster cant angles were conducted to study the contamination and disturbance torque effect. The results demonstrate some recommendations to prevent the unwanted contingency caused by the plume impingement effects in the mission scenario.
- Abstract document