A Time-Efficient Loosely Coupled Fluid-Thermal Analysis Strategy on Dynamic Flight Trajectories

In the design of supersonic and hypersonic missiles, it is essential to perform aerodynamic heating analyses. These analyses can be computationally expensive, as it requires time-dependent conjugate heat transfer analyses. This study proposes a loosely coupled fluid-structural thermal analysis strategy to reduce the computational cost of aerodynamic heating analyses. The proposed strategy solves the fluid and structural equations separately and exchanges information at the interface between two domains. To validate the proposed approach, it is applied to two different missile configurations with different flight scenarios and compared the results to those from the traditional approach, flight data and other published results. The results showed that the loosely coupled has the potential to significantly reduce the time and computational resources required for aerodynamic heating analyses, all while maintaining results accuracy. This has the potential to accelerate the design and development of new missile technologies.