SBIR-STTR Award

The proposed solution will deliver a high-accuracy multi-physics computational capability for Thermal Protection Systems (TPS) design tool for Navy hypersonic flight calculations. This will be accomplished by a semi-implicit dynamic coupling of a high-fidelity three-dimensional transient aerothermal, material ablation, and shape change code with a finite-element analysis code for structural analysis of the TPS material. Validation of the coupled computational capability will be accomplished by utilizing the detailed material properties data of a model ablative that is relevant to the Navy application that have been previously obtained by KAI. Computational affordability will be enabled by developing adaptive mesh refinement capability and scalability for multi-core high-performance computing during Phase II. Reduced-order modeling will be added during Phase II to enable the computational capability for flight trajectory calculations. Arc-jet aerothermal ablation testing will be proposed in the Phase II to obtain more realistic experimental data for code verification and validation. During the Phase I and Phase II of the proposed research program, an automated process for utilizing the TPS design tool will be developed to perform aero-thermal-mechanical survivability analysis across Navy hypersonic flight trajectories.

Benefit:
The proposed solution will directly address a major issue with calculating the realistic behavior of Thermal Protection Systems for hypersonic vehicles. Major deliverables of the proposed Phase I and Phase II work will be a semi-implicit code interface which can dynamically and cost-effectively couple two codes that have disparate characteristics. The TPS design tool delivered from this proposed work will reduce time and costs in the design of advanced TPS material and reduce uncertainty factors that are associated with fast but mostly empirical models, currently deployed. Besides hypersonic applications for the U.S. Navy, this design tool is useful to other aerospace and defense applications that require coupled aerothermal and non-linear structural analysis. This design tool will also be relevant to KAIs current DoD TPS material R&D programs of the next-generation TPS materials for hypersonic vehicles.

Keywords:
reduced-order model, reduced-order model, Aerothermal Analysis, Ablation, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Thermal Protection Systems, Non-linear Structure Analysis, Modeling and Simulations Code, Hypersonics