Integrated Multi-Disciplinary Design of Hot Structures

One of the most challenging tasks for designing thermal protection systems or hot structures for space vehicles is a reliable simulation of the vehicle's thermomechanical behaviour during the hot flight regimes. Complex physical and chemical processes have to be considered in the flow field around the vehicle, since they have a strong influence on the heat loads. There is a significant increase of the surface temperatures during high speed flight phase which in return has a considerable impact on the heat flux rate. To avoid large safety margins, the structure's thermomechanical behaviour can only be determined from a coupled analysis that in detail takes into account the interaction between fluid and structure. Within the research project IMENS (Integrated Multi-disciplinary dEsigN of hot Structures) a software environment has been developed, which is able to perform coupled simulations on hot structures of space vehicles. An essential part of the projects deals with the validation of the numerical results by comparison with dedicated experimental results. Validation is a basic reqirement, before coupled simulations can become common design tools. This lecture gives an overview of the IMENS project and results of the thermomechanical analysis with fluid structure coupling on representative hot structure models