Robust and Efficient Treatment of Temperature Feedback in Fluid–Thermal–Structural Analysis

One of the primary challenges in the development of high-speed systems is accurate and efficient prediction of the aerodynamic heating, particularly for lightweight systems where there is a potential for strong coupling between the aerothermodynamic loads and the structural response. A novel approach is developed that corrects heat flux predictions from a pointwise dependency on surface temperature in order to account for surface temperature gradients. This enables efficient construction of a computational fluid dynamics surrogate for aerodynamic heating without a priori assumptions on the surface temperature profile while also accurately maintaining the critical feedback behavior of the surface temperature profile for a coupled fluid–thermal–structural analysis. The method is compared, in terms of accuracy and efficiency, with a hierarchy of approaches for aerodynamic heating prediction. Comparison cases include simple flat-plate heating, as well as shock impingements in two-dimensional and three-dimensional flows. Typically, the approach yields less than 6% error relative to full-order computational fluid dynamics predictions, and it clearly outperforms all other simple prediction methods in terms of accuracy. Furthermore, it maintains excellent computational efficiency, enabling long-time-record fluid–thermal–structural analysis in complex three-dimensional flow environments.