Thermal Analysis of Fluid-Structural Interaction in High-Speed Engine Flowfields

Abstract

The impetus toward development of a hydrogen-fueled scramjet engine to accelerate aerospace vehicles at hypersonic speeds has focused attention on the need to model accurately the fluid-thermal-structural interaction of such engines. The proposed method is able to solve coupled thermal problems by computing high-speed turbulent and compressible flowfields including multidimensional heat conduction in adjacent walls. To achieve a csompletety conservative coupling at the fluid-structural interface, the same finite element method is applied to both the fluid an the structural equations. The use of the surface energy-balance equation with the boundary integral formulation yields a stable solution procedure for steady-state computations of the stiff problem. For the computation of the heat transfer inside a supersonic combustion chamber, the nonreactive gas flow solver is extended by an energy source term to simulate the heat addition due to the combustion process. The code is tested and applied to a combustor and test conditions experimentally investigated within the framework of the joint German-Russian cooperation on scramjet technology.