A reconstructed approach for online prediction of transient heat flux and interior temperature distribution in thermal protect system

Abstract

Thermal protect system (TPS) is a crucial part of spacecraft to shield them from the aerodynamic heating during the atmospheric entry/re-entry. In this paper, the aerodynamic heating on the surface of a reusable launch vehicle is predicted to achieve rational design of the TPS. The conduction-radiation heat transfer in the TPS that was regard as a kind of index graded medium, was computed using finite volume method and discrete ordinate method. The extended Kalman filtering coupled with Rauch-Tung-Striebel smoother is introduced for calculating the inverse problem to obtain the time-variant heat flux and interior temperature fields in TPS. The impact of the structure parameters and future measurement temperature information on the lag and stability of retrieval results is investigated. The actual heat flux generated at NASA Langley Research Center for the Reusable Launch Vehicle is employed for examining the effectiveness and dependability of the proposed approach. The numerical results demonstrate the present approach can realize precise and on-line prediction of the time-variant heat flux and interior temperature fields in TPS.