Foreword

To be completed

The Main Course

  • The ESTHER Shock Tube: The European Shock Tube for Enthalpy Research (ESTHER) is the crown jewel of the Hypersonic Plasmas Laboratory. This combustion-driven, laser-ignited, two-stage shock tube has been developed by an international consortium led by IPFN, in the scope of a Technology Research Programme funded by the European Space Agency. The facility is fully remotely handled and is capable of reproducing orbital and superorbital (re)entry flows in most planets of the Solar system. It is a key enabling facility for European planetary exploration missions.

  • The SPARK Line-by-Line code: The SPARK Line-by-Line code has been developed for the simulation of high-temperature, low-pressure gas and plasma radiation, with an emphasis on radiation from entry plasmas, ground plasma facilities, and Hall effect thrusters. The code has been developped in MATLAB and FORTRAN languages, and is freely distributed under a GNU General Public License.

  • The GASPAR database: The Gas and Plasma Radiation Database (GasPAR) is a database containing all the relevant data defining the spectroscopic and radiative data for the overall atomic and diatomic species of atmospheric interest. Compilations of numerical data published by different authors is available in downloadable forms.

  • The STELLAR database: The STELLAR database provides detailed multiquantum datasets of vibrationally-specific rates for the simulation of heavy-impact processes in shocked flows for different compositions: Air (N2, O2, and NO), and CO2. The database tens of thousands rates for V-T, V-D, V-E, recombination, and Zeldovich reactions.

  • Thesis & papers: Downloadable versions of key peer-reviewed articles, Ph.D. and M.Sc. thesis prepared in the Hypersonic Plasmas Laboratory.

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