Porous Microstructure Analysis (PuMA) software is used to perform simulations of molecular beam scattering experiments of hyperthermal atomic oxygen striking FiberFormr, a carbon preform material used commonly as a precursor in thermal protection systems (TPS). The purpose of this study is to investigate the reactive interaction of fibrous carbon with atomic oxygen in a complex microstructure, which is the primary source of carbon removal at lower temperatures. The detailed micro-structure of FiberFormr obtained from X-ray micro-tomography is used in the PuMA simulations to capture the complexity of the porous and fibrous characteristic of FiberFormr. A finite-rate surface chemistry model recently constructed from the molecular beam scattering experiments on vitreous carbon is applied to each fiber of the FiberFormr material. This model consists of detailed surface reaction mechanisms such as adsorption, desorption, and several types of Langmuir-Hinshelwood (LH) reactions to characterize the oxygen-carbon interactions at the surface. Comparison between the experimental and PuMA time-of-flight (TOF) distributions of both O and CO show good agreement. It is also found that a significantly higher amount of CO is generated when the beam interacted with FiberFormr, when compared with vitreous carbon. This is postulated to be primarily a result of multiple collisions of oxygen with the fibers, resulting in an higher effective rate of CO production. Multiple collisions with the different fibers, resulting from the porous nature of FiberFormr is also found to thermalize the O atoms, in addition to the adsorption/desorption process. The effect of micro-structure is concluded to be crucial in determining the final composition and energy distributions of the products. Thus, an effective model for the oxygen interaction with FiberFormr, fully accounting for the detailed micro-structure, for use in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and material response codes, is presented.
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