Reacting flows simulation with applications to ground to flight extrapolation

The development of next generation reusable space vehicles requires a precise qualification of their Thermal Protection System materials. The catalytic properties are usually determined in plasma wind tunnels for sets of test conditions relevant to the planned flight mission program. Therefore, for such a situation, it is important to have a methodology that allows for the correct extrapolation of the ground test conditions to the real flight ones and vice-versa. The Local Heat Transfer Simulation concept presented in this paper is a possible strategy to accomplish such a task. The computational results show that the ground test conditions are indeed correctly ex-trapolated to the flight ones and a simple method to account for possible discrepancies between the two configurations is presented.