Research On Conceptual Design & Analyze Methods For Tps Of Hypersonic Vehicles

Hypersonic vehicles have become hotspots of major countries and regions in the world due to the fast development of space technology.Space shuttle and reusable launch vehicles are typical representatives of hypersonic vehicles.The study and research of hypersonic technologies have great signif icance for homeland security,economic development as well as scientif ic research.However traditional approaches for analyzing and designing ordinary aircrafts are not sufficient for hypersonic vehicles,thus we need to develop new design methodology for hypersonic vehicles from conceptual to detailed design phase.Hypersonic vehicles contain several sub-systems,and thermal protection system(TPS)is one of the most important ones.This thesis focuses on developing a method in analyzing and designing TPS for hypersonic vehicles during the conceptual design phase.In order to meet the requirement of computational efficiency and accuracy,this thesis makes some reasonable simplif ications of the heating environment at the exterior surface of a hypersonic vehicle and set up mathematical model for heat conduction within TPS.Then,three kinds of numerical methods including Finite Element Method(FEM),Finite Difference Method(FDM)and Finite Volume Method(FVM)were applied to solve the heat conduction equation.The computational results indicate that FEM provides the best efficiency with relatively high accuracy among all these three numerical methods.It will save a lot of computational effort when applying the fastest calculation method.In order to improve the efficiency in TPS design and analyze,surrogate model of TPS material thickness-heat flux has been built using FEM.Methods for simplifying the 2-D TPS heat conduction model to 1-D model have also been studied and validated with ITPS structure.This thesis has chosen FEM as the computing core for the heat conduction analysis.In addition,we developed a new software named ?TPS Fast Analysis and Design Tool 1.0? with a TPS material database attached to it.This software was tested with a full-scale X37 B model.Two designs of TPS similar to the one used on “Columbia” space shuttle were analyzed and validated for the X37 B model.The weight and volume of two achieved TPS designs are both within reasonable tolerance.In summary,the developed software can be applied as a practical tool in analyzing and des igning TPS for future hypersonic vehicles during conceptual design phase.