Base Heating Environment During Ground Testing of a Lunar Lander Demonstrator

What is it about?

This study provided base heating environments for the testing of a four-engine lunar lander demonstrator on pad and hovering at a distance over ground, using an anchored computational methodology. Important near-ground base flow physics captured include the fountain jet, plume afterburning, nozzle plume-to-ground impingement, fountain jet-to-base impingement, base wall jet, and exhaust plume growth. More importantly, due to the layout of the nozzles and operating conditions, it is found that the Coanda effect prominently affected the fountain jet behavior.

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