Computational Approach for Aeroheating with Thermally Coupled Fields

Abstract

In this paper, a coupling methodology was proposed to solve simultaneously the external flowfield of a hypersonic reentry vehicle/capsule and the resultant heating on the vehicle’s structure and internal components with buoyancy-driven very low-speed flows resulting from conjugate heat transfer through the thermal protection system of the vehicle/capsule. Two flow solvers were employed to solve the hypersonic flowfield and the very low-speed flowfield, respectively. The coupling was done through the exchange of appropriate interface data between the two solvers. One of them was a density-based solver, and the other was a pressure-based solver. Validations of the individual solvers were done with two benchmark cases. The proposed coupling method was proved through simulating two conjugate heat transfer problems. Finally, an aerothermal–man–machine system exposed in a hypersonic flow was computed using the proposed coupling method.