Hypersonic Plasmas Laboratory

  • N'
  • HPL

SPARK

The Software Package for Aerothermodynamics, Radiation and Kinetics (SPARK) is the sole Aerothermodynamic tool available in Portugal. The code is composed by two main modules:

  • SPARK – CFD, a world-class Navier-Stokes code for the modelling of entry plasmas. The code includes a high-fidelity viscous model, including plasma effects, surface catalysis effects, and multi-temperature or state-to-state approaches to model thermodynamic non-equilibrium effects.
  • SPARK– Radiation, a line-by-line radiative code ranging from the VUV to the IR regions. The code adopts high-fidelity ray-transfer algorithms for the accurate modelling of spacecraft radiative heating, and uses the spectroscopic database GASPAR maintained by IPFN (http://esther.ist.utl.pt/gaspar).

Solvers

    Frozen gas
    Multispecies reactive flow
    Equilibrium, Two-temperature and state-to-state kinetics solvers
    Euler + State-to-state kinetics
    Navier-Stokes + Equilibrium/Two-Temperature kinetics

Reactive Flow

    Detailed kinetic databases
    Non-equilibrium gas temperature and chemistry

Numerics

    Spatial: 2nd order finite-volume schemes
    Temporal: Explicit and Implicit

Data Structure

    1D, 2D structured solver
    Gas, Flow, Field, Mesh objects
    PDF automatic plots

Software Engineering

    Object Oriented (fortran 2003)
    Version Management GIT
    Inline documentation in the source code
    Automatic Regression Tests
    Keyword-based input file
    Detailed logger output