Tile Gap Heat Soak-Back Simulator (2D)

Reusable ceramic-tile thermal protection survives reentry by refusing to conduct heat, but a tile array is never a single seamless surface — it is broken up by thousands of narrow gaps between tiles, and those gaps are known to run hotter than the tile faces around them. This simulator solves the 2D transient heat-conduction equation across a cross-section spanning from a tile's center out to the neighbouring gap: a reentry-shaped heat pulse hits the coated surface with a spanwise-varying intensity that spikes near the gap, a radiative-equilibrium boundary condition balances incoming flux against blackbody re-radiation at every point along that surface, and the heat that gets through keeps diffusing both inward and sideways toward the airframe. Adjust the peak heating rate, tile thickness, insulation conductivity, coating emissivity and gap-heating boost, then watch the gap column run hotter at the surface and — after a lag set by the insulation's diffusivity — see that extra heat show up as a real, measurable spanwise temperature difference at the backface, a soak-back signature a 1D through-thickness-only model cannot produce.