Aerothermal Environment Definition for a Reusable Experimental Re-entry Vehicle Wing

摘要

The development of the wing leading edge thermal protection system for a re-entry vehicle requires a deep understanding of the aero-thermal environment surrounding the vehicle. A technological project, founded by the Italian Space Agency, focused on the assessment of the applicability of Ultra High Temperature Ceramics (UHTC) or active cooling system to the fabrication of high performance and slender shaped hot structures for reusable launch vehicles wing leading edge has been started considering the configuration and the mission profile of the future experimental Flight Test Bed, named FTB-X, whose analysis is going on in the framework of the USV Program carried out at CIRA, the Italian Aerospace Research Centre within the P.R.O.R.A (Italian Aerospace Research Program). The current activity has been carried out within the Advanced Structural Assembly (ASA) project funded by the Italian Space Agency and by Thales Alenia Space as prime. Aim of this paper is to show the development and application of a simplified methodology to evaluate the time history of the aerothermal environment over the wing, capable of giving results as much reliable as possible in a reasonable time. This methodology is mainly based on the combined use of bi-dimensional CFD simulations over a number of wing sections suitably scaled by means of a restricted set of three dimensional CFD simulations. Results of the methodology has been successfully compared with full vehicle computations in thermo-chemical non equilibrium.