Modeling ablative behavior and thermal response of carbon/carbon composites

Carbon/carbon composites usually work in complex thermo-chemical environments, surface recession is thus inevitable due to chemical ablation and further affects the system stability and safety. In this paper, a model for chemical ablation of the materials which accounts for the effects of non-uniform temperature and pressure is proposed. As an application, the surface recession of a carbon/carbon composites leading edge structure are simulated in detail. The results show that the non-uniform distributed pressure plays an important role in the final ablation configuration. The effects of altitude and oxidation protection on the chemical ablation are discussed as well.