Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Ab Initio Computation Of Radiative Properties Of Monatomic Hydrogen, Fanny Thomas

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

With renewed interest in planetary atmospheric entry, descent, and landing, NASA has noted a need for improved physics modeling in computational fluid dynamics. Uncertainty in experimental data used in radiation heat transfer computations leads to “over-engineering” of entry body heat shields, at large weight and cost penalties. There is interest in developing hypersonic thermophysics models from the known “first principles” of physics.

A method for computing high temperature gas emissivity and absorptivity from quantum mechanics principles is developed. The Schroedinger wave equation is cast as a discretized matrix eigenvalue problem which is solved using the ERAU parallel supercomputer. The numerical …