Michele Capriati

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Research Engineer at von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-3276.vid During atmospheric entry, the flow environment around capsules or space debris is characterized by complex fluid thermochemistry and gas-surface interactions (GSI). Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of these conditions are crucial in the design process of such objects. A...

The accurate modeling of gas-surface interaction phenomena is crucial for predicting the heat flux and the mass loss experienced by atmospheric entry bodies. Gas-surface interactions refer to the phenomena occurring between the reacting gas and the material. An important part of the modeling is the description of the surface chemical reactions. We...

Elaborate methodologies have been developed to study the thermo-chemical response of materials in high-enthalpy flows. To reach the high magnitudes of heat flux encountered in some hypersonic applications, one can resort to supersonic jets. They involve several physical effects, such as detached shocks ahead of probes. Because of these features, ch...

The numerical simulation of hypersonic atmospheric entry flows is a challenging problem. Prediction of quantities of interest, such as surface heat flux and pressure, is strongly influenced by the mesh quality using conventional second-order spatial accuracy schemes while depending on boundary conditions, which may generally suffer from uncertainty...

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-2849.vid The effect of finite-rate internal energy transfer on shock interaction mechanisms of CO2-dominated flows is investigated. The polyatomic molecule has a relatively low characteristic vibrational temperature that causes vibrational degrees of freedom to be excited across a shock wave a...