An inverse method for non linear ablative thermics with experimentation of automatic differentiation

Abstract

Thermal Protection System is a key element for atmospheric re-entry missions of aerospace vehicles. The high level of heat fluxes encountered in such missions has a direct effect on mass balance of the heat shield. Consequently, the identification of heat fluxes is of great industrial interest but is in flight only available by indirect methods based on temperature measurements. This paper is concerned with inverse analyses of highly evolutive heat fluxes. An inverse problem is used to estimate transient surface heat fluxes (convection coefficient), for degradable thermal material (ablation and pyrolysis), by using time domain temperature measurements on thermal protection. The inverse problem is formulated as a minimization problem involving an objective functional, through an optimization loop. An optimal control formulation (Lagrangian, adjoint and gradient steepest descent method combined with quasi-Newton method computations) is then developed and applied, using Monopyro, a transient one-dimensional thermal model with one moving boundary (ablative surface) that has been developed since many years by ASTRIUM-ST. To compute numerically the adjoint and gradient quantities, for the inverse problem in heat convection coefficient, we have used both an analytical manual differentiation and an Automatic Differentiation (AD) engine tool, Tapenade, developed at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis by the TROPICS team. Several validation test cases, using synthetic temperature measurements are carried out, by applying the results of the inverse method with minimization algorithm. Accurate results of identification on high fluxes test cases, and good agreement for temperatures restitutions, are obtained, without and with ablation and pyrolysis, using bad fluxes initial guesses. First encouraging results with an automatic differentiation procedure are also presented in this paper.