Numerical simulation for laser propulsion of air breathing mode considering moving boundaries and multi-pulses

In the previous work, we found the momentum coupling coefficient C-m of multi-pulse propulsion was lower than that of die single pulse case for the air-breathing mode. To learn the mechanism of this phenomenon, the multi-pulse simulation of the parabolic flyer taken as a moving object are carried out by using the dynamic mesh method of the commercial code FLUENT. The calculated results show that the momentum coupling coefficient C-m for a fixed boundary is larger than that of a moving boundary, and C-m for a flyer initially at rest is larger than that with initial velocity. For multi-pulse simulation, the process of 6 pulses (20 Hz, 0.3s) is computed and the results show that the average C-m decreases with the number of the laser pulses, but the trend of the decreasing is slowdown, which can fit the experimental results.