Rapid method for calculating aero-heating coupled with structure heat transfer on hypersonic vehicles

A new rapid method is presented for computing aero-heating coupled with structural temperature field of thermal protection structure (TPS) for hypersonic vehicles. This method includes the numerical solution of inviscid flow and empirical method for aero-heating. In this method, the calculation of aerodynamic heating is simplified into two parts: the numerical solution of inviscid flow (outside the boundary layer) around the aircraft and the empirical solution of heat flux inside the boundary layer. It has the advantages of dealing with flow over the complex configurations in numerical simulation and high efficiency in the engineering calculation. Furthermore, the present method also considers the effects of high temperature chemical non-equilibrium, the heat transfer process in thermal protection structure, and the dynamic interpolation method of trajectory flight state. These considerations can highly efficiently analyze the flow field around the complex hypersonic vehicles, as well as the characteristics of thermal environment and heat-insulation structure temperature distribution with flying time. Numerical method developed in this paper is applied to solve hypersonic fluid-structural-thermal coupled problems for hypersonic RAM-CII and X-37B configuration under flight conditions based on thermal protection system layout. The distributions of temperature and heat flux are obtained and the time-variant characteristics are analyzed. The calculation results show that the rapid computing technology is credible and can be used for the analysis of thermal protection systems and aerodynamic heating characteristics in hypersonic vehicles design.