Current efforts to develop new reusable launch vehicles and to pursue low-cost robotic planetary missions have led to a renewed interest in understanding arcjet flows. Part of this renewed interest is concerned with improving the understanding of arcjet test results and the potential use of available computational-fluid-dynamic (CFD) codes to aid in this effort. These CFD codes have been extensively developed and tested for application to nonequilibrium hypersonic flow modeling. It is envisioned perhaps naively, that the application of these CFD codes to the simulation of arcjet flows would serve two purposes: first, the codes would help to characterize the nonequilibrium nature of the arcjet flows; and second, arcjet experiments could potentially be used to validate the flow models. These two objectives are, to some extent, mutually exclusive. However, the purpose of the present discussion is to address what role CFD codes can play in the current arcjet flow characterization effort, and whether or not the simulation of arcjet facility tests can be used to evaluate some of the modeling that is used to formulate these codes.

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