Low-cost non-intrusive sensitivity analysis technique for heat and mass transfer in porous media, with application to space-vehicle heat-shield design

A low-cost non intrusive sensitivity analysis technique is applied to heat and mass transfer in porous media. To illustrate the approach, the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) functional expansion is explicitly derived on an analytic problem - heat transfer in solid materials. Then, a non-intrusive formulation is proposed for heat and mass transfer computer codes. It relies on an Anchored-ANOVA strategy permitting to perform low-cost sensitivity analysis in problems featuring a large number of uncertain parameters. Its applicability to complex heat and mass transfer problems is demonstrated for space vehicle heat-shield design. The sensitivity analysis method has been coded in a computer program that has been interfaced with the Porous material Analysis Toolbox based on OpenFOAM (PATO) released Open Source by NASA. Then, a Polynomial-Chaos method is used in order to compute the statistics of some quantities of interest for the atmospheric entry of the Stardust capsule, by taking into account uncertainties on heat-shield material properties and chemistry models.