Development of Inverse Heat Transfer Methods for Reconstructing Aerothermal Entry Environments

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific postdoctoral position focuses on developing and advancing innovative inverse heat transfer methodologies to achieve accurate, efficient post-flight reconstructions of aerothermal entry environments. The research addresses the extreme thermal environments spacecraft encounter during atmospheric entry, which require advanced thermal protection systems (TPS) for mission success. Current inverse heat transfer methods tend to be computationally intensive and may be unsuitable for capturing the effects of material recession in ablative TPS. The goal is to explore solutions that reduce computational demands while improving the reliability and applicability of these techniques for a broader range of scenarios. The developed methods will be applied to both existing and new flight data, with applications in high-enthalpy test environments like arc jet testing.