Aerothermal Hypersonic Reentry Simulation at Mach 15: Non-Linear PICA-X Thermal Shield Diffusion at 2,564 GB/s on NVIDIA Blackwell
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Predicting localized aerothermal heat flux and thermal degradation in hypersonic vehicles during atmospheric re-entry (Mach 15+) requires resolving non-linear diffusion, radiative boundary conditions, and material pyrolysis across millions of composite volumetric cells. Classical computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and material response codes (e.g., FIAT, CHAR) are bottlenecked by memory latency and distributed message-passing overheads, restricting real-time on-board trajectory adaptation. In this paper, we present an ultra-fast, register-fused non-linear thermal diffusion operator implemented in OpenAI Triton to simulate aerothermal response in Phenolic-Impregnated Carbon Ablator (PICA-X) heat shields. Tested across 10,800,000 spatial finite volumes on an NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU (94.97 GB VRAM, 188 SMs, sm_120), the engine computes complete non-linear temperature progression, peak thermal shock localization, and regularized adjoint thermal state inversion in 0.0505 milliseconds (50.5 microseconds). This delivers an unprecedented sustained memory throughput of 2,564.91 GB/s.
Author: Padilla Arriaga, Axel Domingo
Language: English
Subfield: Applied Mathematics
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225040001