Reconstruction of aero-thermal heating and thermal protection material response of a Reusable Launch Vehicle using inverse method

Abstract

A transient inverse heat conduction analysis based on Lavenberg–Marquardt method is presented to reconstruct the aero-thermal heating and thermal protection material response of a Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV), from the knowledge of temperature measurements taken within the thermal protection system. In this analysis, due to the lack of real experimental set-up to measure the temperature however it is generated by direct approach using real heating profile on the surface of RLV developed at NASA Langley Research Center. The direct analysis is performed by an explicit one-dimensional finite difference code to determine the in-depth temperature response of Integrated Thermal Protection System (ITPS) of RLV. The temperature data determined from direct approach is used to simulate the temperature measurements. The effects of thermocouple arrangement and measurement error upon the stability of inverse results are investigated. Results show that the Lavenberg–Marquardt is an effective technique to predict aero-thermal heating of RLV by using inverse approach.