Von Karman Institute in partnership with Ecole Centrale Paris are launching the QB50 program, comprising 50 CubeSats capable of performing scientific experiments in the thermosphere. One of these Cubesats, QARMAN, is designed to make measurements of ablation to inform the design of thermal protection systems for re-entry vehicles.QARMAN will deploy a passive braking system upon re-entry to the atmosphere and peak-heating is expected to occur at an altitude of 50km. This was the design point for trajectory modelling. The re-entry velocity was determined to be in the range of 7.5 -7.57km/s. The resulting velocity at peak-heating was found to be 6.35km/s using the lower bound of the entry velocity range.A computational model was built to simulate the flow conditions over QARMAN during peak heating. The compressible flow code, eilmer3, was used and a 2D model was built subject to simplifying assumptions of the geometry of QARMAN. Bow-shock, boundary layer, and oblique-shock interactions were observed, and the boundary layer displacement thickness was measured to be 6.89mm at a distance 340mm downstream of the nose. A shock stand-off distance, influenced by boundary layer propagation, was observed, and measured to be 52.8mm upstream of the interface of fore-body and wedge-tip. This represents a stand-off distance that is 7.66 times the displacement thickness which is significantly larger than the commonly used 4x multiplier.A 3:10 scaled-model of QARMAN was designed and built. A recess within the model allows for gauges to measure heat data, and the location of 8 holes to house thin-film gauges has been outlines. Two additional mounting pieces were designed and built to hold the model in the test section and these can be used for mounting other models.An experiment has been designed for The University of Queensland's X2 expansion tube.The post-shock density was found and binary scaling was used to determine an appropriate driver gas configuration. Analytical calculation of the boundary layer thickness was compared with the CFD output and a difference between their predicted shock stand-off distances was found. The positioning of sensors was designed to capture this region of interest and comparison between experiments, CFD, and analytical predictions is recommended.
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