A highly efficient and accurate FE-ROM method for thermal-mechanical buckling of heat transfer panels

Abstract

Thin-walled panels are commonly used in high-speed aircrafts and space launcher vehicles. These applications often serve in a complex operating environment with the thermal-mechanical coupling loading. The steady-state temperature field eventually produced by the aerodynamic heating should be taken into account when solving the structural elastic deformations. This work proposes a highly efficient and accurate finite element based reduced-order modeling (FE-ROM) method for the thermal-mechanical buckling of heat transfer panels. The classical Koiter asymptotic expansion is reformulated to be applicable for thermal-mechanical buckling problems. The thermal-mechanical reduced-order model is constructed based on the novel Koiter theory. The complex temperature field produced by the heat transfer is skillfully considered in the reduced system. The predictor-corrector scheme based on the reduced system is developed to trace the thermoelastic geometrically nonlinear response. Various flat/curved panels with isotropic/orthotropic materials, are selected to validate the high efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method, considering different thermal-mechanical coupling loads, heat resource locations, geometrical shapes and lamination configurations.