Author(s)

Pradyumna Ghosh, M. K. Ghosh

.

A CFD(Computational Fluid Dynamics) model has been developed using the commercial CFD package FLUENT for the thermal convection inside air filled cylindrical DACON sensor, where the onboard time dependent gravitational micro acceleration has been considered. Time dependent, curve fitted gravitational accelera-tion in x- and y-axes from published data have been incorporated in FLUENT through a User Defined Function (UDF), developed in C which includes space craft rotation. At the sensor plane the two-dimensional flow has also been visualized. A good agreement is between simu-lation and published experimental data. Last but not the least, for checking its response to suffi-ciently strong perturbations in an orbital flight, physical and numerical experiments are carried out where an astronaut swung the sensor in hands along the y axis with amplitude of 10cm and a frequency of 0.2 Hz. A good qualitative validation has been achieved between CFD and actual experimental results.

CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics); DACON sensor; Experimental Data; FLUENT; UDF (User Defined Functions)

Ghosh, P. and Ghosh, M. (2011) CFD evaluation of thermal convection inside the DACON convection sensor in actual space flight. Natural Science, 3, 419-425. doi: 10.4236/ns.2011.36057.