- with application to material response under high-enthalpy environments

A critical problem in the design of Thermal Protection Systems (TPS) for planetary probes and re-entry capsules is the choice of a heatshield material and its associated material response model. Typically, in Earth re-entry, the temperature of the flow reaches 10,000K in the shock layer and leads to a wall temperature of about 4000K. No (known) material is able to withstand such conditions. For very high speed entries, a new class of ablative materials has been introduced and validated in flight by the Stardust (1) mission [1]. This new class of low density Carbon/Resin (C/R) composites, made of a carbon fiber preform impregnated in phenolic resin, is rapidly developing. PICA [2], the low density C/R conceived at NASA Ames and used for Stardust, has been selected and adapted for Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) heatshield. PICA-X has been developed by SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corp.) with the assistance of NASA to protect their Dragon capsule during re-entry [3]. The European Space Agency (ESA) is currently supporting the development of a light weight C/R ablator that could be used for sample return missions [4]. Under a certain number of conservative hypotheses, state-of-the-art pyrolysis-ablation models may be used to design TPS made from this new class of PICA-like materials. However, revisiting the state-of-the-art pyrolysis-ablation models appears crucial to improve current design tools [1, 5] and to understand, estimate, and reduce design uncertainties [6]. Therefore, numerous conservative hypotheses have to be removed; this dramatically increases the complexity of th