Effect of Insulations and Coatings on Hypersonic Heat Flux Reconstruction

Abstract

The present study investigates the effects of material discontinuities and thermal resistances on the temperature reconstruction and heat flux evaluation via an inverse heat transfer method in hypersonic wind-tunnel tests. Thin coating layers and adhesive interfaces support a localized multidimensional temperature perturbation that alters the near-surface field. A technique is developed for the real-time evaluation of the heat transfer based on approximating the Green’s function of the heat conduction equation in bounded complex domains and resolving the heat flux on a B-spline basis, leading to an efficient and robust algorithm. Evaluating the Green’s function for three-dimensional problems with material discontinuities is generally difficult. A new approach is developed in which the Green’s function is evaluated independently for the regular partitions of the domain, and appropriate connection conditions are derived to determine the full “system” Green’s function. This paper describes the verification, validation, and application of the approach to the heat flux reconstruction for a nonaxisymmetric flat-faced article with coating and potting interfaces. The article was tested at Mach 6 in the Virginia Tech Hypersonic wind tunnel using four temperature sensors arranged in a cross pattern on the flat face. Good agreement was obtained between computational fluid dynamics predictions and the heat flux deduced from the experiments using the new data analysis method.