Near-wall flow temperature sensing remains important for many hypersonic aerodynamics and propulsion applications. Flight test applications, in particular, demand robust and accurate sensing, making thermocouple sensors attractive. Even for these extremely well-developed sensors, the prediction of stresses within thermocouple sheaths for custom-configured probes remains a topic of great concern for ensuring adequate lifetime of sensors. In contemporary practice, high-fidelity simulations must be run to prove if a new design will work at all, albeit at significant time and expense. Given the time and money it takes to run high-fidelity simulations, rapid optimization of sensor configurations is often impossible, or at minimum, impractical. The developments presented in this paper address the need for hypersonic flow temperature sensor structural predictions which are compatible with rapid design iteration. The derivation and implementation of a new analytical, low-order model to predict stresses within the sheath of a thermocouple are provided. The analytical model is compared to high-fidelity ANSYS mechanical simulations as well as simplified experimental data. The predictions using the newly developed structural low-order model are in excellent agreement with the numerically simulated results and experimental results with an absolute maximum percent error of approximately 4% and 9.5%, respectively, thus validating the model.
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