Coupled analysis of aerodynamic heating, radiative heat transfer and heat conduction for hypersonic vehicles

The aerodynamic heating results in the rapid rise of the surface temperature of hypersonic vehicles. As a key factor that influences the selection and design of thermal structures, equilibrium surface temperatures occur when the aerodynamic heat flux imposed on the surface is balance by thermal radiation from the surface, which are typically utilized in the conceptual and preliminary designs of hypersonic vehicles. Obviously the equilibrium surface temperature is the peak temperature that thermal-structure can achieve, since heat conducted into the structure is not calculated when the surface fluxed are balanced. In order to accurately obtain the temperature environment over specified trajectories, an integrated coupled approach in which the aerodynamic heating, radiative heat transfer and structure heat conduction are all taken into account is proposed. This study aims to develop a coupled analysis methodology for the temperature environment prediction under combined aerodynamic heating, radiative transfer and structure heat conduction. The integrated coupled approach is used to obtain the temperature environment of the typical control surface for a representative hypersonic trajectory. Results illustrate that the temperature environment obtained by integrated coupled approach is obviously lower than that by equilibrium, which regularly leads to 25% maximum percent error on the leading edge, 48% maximum percent error on the other regions. Furthermore, the estimation temperature is associated with the trajectory, which indicates that during climbing phase, the difference of surface temperature obtained by equilibrium and coupled approach is much larger than that during gliding phase.