Aerothermal Analysis on Effectiveness of Thermal Protection System on VEGA-C Launch Vehicle

The present work focuses on the aerothermal analysis of the VEGA-C launcher during the early stage of its ascent flight. This phase is known to be critical due to the presence of severe heat fluxes that could cause structural damage and, consequently, may lead to the mission failure. Specifically, the conjugate heat transfer (CHT) technique, implemented in the commercial code CFD++, was applied to evaluate the effectiveness of thermal protections on VEGA-C. The results of this analysis were compared to those provided by numerical calculations performed using the same computational fluid dynamics solver but prescribing isothermal wall conditions on the launch vehicle surface. This comparison highlighted the benefits of the CHT approach. Through this methodology, the authors were able to evaluate the effectiveness of thermal protections on the entire launcher and provide an optimized design for this system.