Numerical simulation and experimental validation of effective thermal conductivity coefficient of hexagonal aramid honeycomb used in wing skin of tourist class reusable spaceplane

Abstract

Lightweight aramid honeycombs are promising cores for sandwich structures in aerospace applications due to their high specific properties. The determination of the in-plane and through-plane thermal conductivity of the aramid honeycomb is a sophisticated problem due to combined heat transfer inside the honeycomb cell. The aim of the present study is to investigate the thermal conductivity of aramid honeycomb core used in the wing structure of the suborbital tourist class spaceplane via heat transfer modelling of the representative volume element of the material. The analytical and experimental methodology is developed to validate the results of numerical modelling. The methodology includes the experimental obtaining of time dependences of the thermal conductivity coefficients of the wing skin element on the contact heating installation. The subsequent solution of the inverse heat conduction problem is followed by finding in-plane and through-plane thermal conductivity of honeycomb core. Overall, the experimental results have a good agreement with the numerical simulations. The findings in this study provide an important foundation for the subsequent thermal and structural design of the spaceplane wing.