Confirmation of Candidature - Advance Co-Design Method Integrating Thermal Modeling for TPS Design for High Speed Flight and Access to Space Systems

The design of hypersonic aircraft has always been a challenge because of the operating environment and the highly integrated nature of the vehicle. Given the high thermal loads the vehicle has to endure makes accounting for those loads critical for the survivability of the vehicle. When designing and analyzing a model, one main effecting factor is the interactions between the different system components as thermal, structural etc. If the design is done in a step wise process, these interactions occur in the later phases. And if the interactions are problematic then a significant re design should be done. This will be very time consuming and costly. Also, the interactions between some components may be mutually beneficial. This design approach won't be able to take advantage of it. Hence, there has been interest in an approach that can navigate these complexities while still being sufficiently accurate. This research utilities one such approach and proposes an effective way to analyze these thermal loads in a dynamic operational envelop. The primary aim of this research is to be able to correctly capture the heat loads over a trajectory and to use this knowledge to understand how the Thermal Protection System (TPS) design choices affect mission performance. This will benefit the better design and selection of TPS materials. The different regions of the vehicle has different thermal loads acting on it. If we are able to predict these loads, then we can better design the TPS as per the requirement. Also, several different types of TPS are in use currently material wise. With more insight to the heat loads, better selection of TPS material will be an ease. The work plans to achieve the goal by simplifying the structural dynamic system via Model Order Reduction approach, establishing approximate heat transfer models making use of empirical correlations to form an effective dynamic transient system. The chapter 3 describes the overview of the research and provides the methodology to approximate the lower order heat transfer method, model order reduction techniques and forming a effective dynamic system. It also discusses the co-design approach which is a holistic design approach where different aspects are analyzed in unison making the design process more effective. Chapter 4, details the work done till date on the approximate heat transfer modeling and model order reduction in a test case. The results obtained shows great potential of this approach to model a transient heat transfer problems. This work has been submitted to the Australian Fluid Mechanics Conference 2024.

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