Abstract: When an asteroid enters the Earth`s atmosphere, extreme aerodynamics and thermal load induced by hypersonic flow interactions cause the object to disintegrate, in what is known as an airburst. Traditionally, airburst events are simulated as a fluid-structure interaction problem, where an inlet boundary condition will send in air particles at hypersonic speed to form a bow shock on a bolide. Due to its computational complexity, other reduce-order models, such as surrogating the hypersonic flow field with an equivalent surface pressure force, are also used. We propose a novel hybrid approach for simulating airburst events using Spheral++, an open-source smoothed particle hydrodynamics code maintained at Lawerence Livermore National Lab with a Fluid-Solid Interface adaptation. Utilizing this approach, we can achieve high-fidelity simulations while reducing the computational complexity. We validate our approach by comparing the kinetic energy curve with full two-phase simulations while varying different parameters.
About the speaker: Ian V. Li is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, advised by Professor Panos Papadopoulos. His primary research area is understanding the thermomechanical behavior of highly heterogeneous materials using computational homogenization. In addition, he is interested in utilizing data science techniques to develop efficient surrogate models of complex physical phenomena. He completed his B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering, with a minor in Computer Science, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2020.