Calculation of radiation in shockwave layer of a space vehicle taking into account details of photon spectrum

Calculations of radiation transport in the shockwave layer of a descent space vehicle cause essential difficulties due to complex multi-resonance dependence of the absorption macroscopic cross sections from the photon energy. The convergence of two approximate spectrum averaging methods to the results of exact pointwise spectrum calculations is investigated. The first one is the well known multigroup method, the second one is the Lebesgue averaging method belonging to methods of the reduction of calculation points by means of aggregation of spectral points which are characterized by equal absorption strength. It is shown that convergence of the Lebesgue averaging method is significantly faster than the multigroup approach as the number of groups is increased. The only 100–150 Lebesgue groups are required to achieve the accuracy of pointwise calculations even in the shock layer at upper atmosphere with sharp absorption lines. At the same time the number of calculations is reduced by more than four order. Series of calculations of the radiation distribution function in 2D shock layer around a sphere and a blunt cone were performed using the local flat layer approximation and the Lebesgue averaging method. It is shown that the shock wave radiation becomes more significant both in value of the energy flux incident on the body surface and in the rate of energy exchange with the gas-dynamic flow in the case of increasing of the vehicle's size.