Aerothermoelastic Load Calculation for Hypersonic Vehicles Based on Multiphysics Coupled Analysis

Abstract

To fulfill the design objective of a structure and thermal protection system, accurate load environment prediction is very important, so we present a high-fidelity aerothermoelastic load calculation method based on a partitioned computational fluid dynamics/computational structural dynamics/computational thermal dynamics (CFD/CSD/CTD) coupling analysis. For the data transformation between the CFD/CSD/CTD systems, finite element interpolation (FEI) is explored, and a shape-preserving grid deformation strategy is achieved via radical basis functions (RBFs). Numerical results are presented for validation of the proposed CFD/CSD/CTD coupling analysis. First, a simply supported panel in hypersonic flow is investigated for results comparison of the proposed coupling method and previous work. Second, a hypersonic forebody is investigated to explore the aerothermoelastic effects while considering the feedback between deformation and aerodynamic heating. The results show that the CFD/CSD/CTD coupling method is accurate for analysis of aerothermoelasticity. In addition, considering the aerothermoelastic effect, the shear force and bending movement increase with time before 900s and decrease after 900s, and at 900s increased percentages of 5.7% and 4.1% are observed, respectively. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt high-fidelity CFD/CSD/CTD coupling in the design of a structure and thermal protection system for hypersonic vehicles.