Evaluating the Impact of Large Eddy Simulations in Rocket Exhaust Modeling
Erick Giovani Sperandio Nascimento1; Davidson Martins Moreira2; Gilberto Fisch3; Taciana Toledo de Almeida Albuquerque1; Larissa Coutinho Rosa1; Rizzieri Pedruzzi1
1 Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo; 2 SENAI/CIMATEC; 3 Instituto de Aeronáutica e Espaço
doi:10.20906/CPS/CILAMCE2015-0438
Resumo
A remarkable air pollution problem is related with rocket launches. During the launch, the burning of rocket engines forms a huge cloud of hot and buoyant exhaust contaminants near the ground, which rises and interacts with the ambient air until the cloud reaches equilibrium with ambient conditions. Although such events happen less frequently, they are carried out in places, called space launching centers, where the impact can be outstandingly dangerous if there are nearby populated areas. Some of these space launching centers are located close to populated areas and they may be affected by the gases released during the launchings. In order to estimate the risks associated and the environmental impacts from the launchings (either normal or failed), a special model named REEDM was developed by NASA, in USA. Derived from this model, a modern approach has been developed called "Modelo Simulador da Dispersão de Efluentes de Foguetes" (MSDEF), in Portuguese, incorporating some advances that will be further explained. The model needs to be provided with surface and sounding wind speed and direction, in addition to other meteorological variables like temperature, radiation and terrain height. Commonly, it can be achieved by conducting measurement campaigns for certain periods that can be representative for the target region. However, this approach is often expensive and mostly do not cover the entire region or period being considered. In order to address this constraint, a common approach is to perform meteorological modeling to generate the required information for air quality modeling. For this purpose, we choose to use the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF), which is the state-of-the-art in meteorological modeling. However, the highest resolution available in the default version of the WRF model is of 1 km, which is very coarse in terms of the spatial scale of the formation, stabilization and dispersion of the rocket exhaust cloud formed near the ground. So, it is required to run the WRF model using a highe
Palavras-chave: rocket exhaust cloud; atmospheric dispersion; Alcântara Launch Center; MSDEF; WRF-LES