August 8, 2023 at 10:31 pm
Surya Deb
Ansys Employee

Hello, 

If I undertsand the issue properly, then there are 2 ways to model this.

  1. Use Fluent's Electric Potential Model to provide the required boundary condition on the re-rentry vehicle. You might need good information on the electric potential boundary conditions. Also, there are limitations of this approach, specially if you are planning to use shell conduction.
  2. The second approach can be to provide energy sources directly to cells neighboring the heated wall. It will be volumetric source term and you can use Cell register approach to mark the cells in and around the heated wall and then patch the source using the register. Alternatively, you can use UDF route by making use of connectivity macros.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

SD