Towards More Efficient Fluid-Thermal Interaction Analysis for Hypersonic Trajectory Flights

Analysis of coupled fluid-thermal interactions (FTI) for long duration hypersonic flight is a challenging problem due to a number of numerical and computational concerns. Obtaining stable and accurate hypersonic flow solution is difficult due to strong shocks, grid sensitivity, and severe time step size restriction. Also, a wide mismatch in the time scales of fluid flow and thermal conduction in solid makes long duration time accurate aero-heating analysis computationally expensive. In this work we extend previously developed and validated weakly coupled transient FTI capability by implementing subcycling and quasi-steady coupling workflows to make long duration hypersonic aero-heating analysis more tractable. The subcycling workflow achieved speed up of 8.3x and the quasi-steady workflow achieved speed up of 1600x over the weakly coupled approach developed in the previous work while producing the same heating prediction. The coupling workflows are validated using experimental data for aero-heating of a cylinder in Mach 6.47 flow. This work also explores application of the quasi-steady workflow for long duration (250 seconds) aero-heating of a nose cone over a hypothetical Mach 7 hypersonic trajectory path. It demonstrates progress towards a practical design and analysis capability for hypersonic aero-heating prediction.