Time-Adaptive, Loosely Coupled Strategy for Conjugate Heat Transfer Problems in Hypersonic Flows

This paper describes the development of a novel, time-adaptive, loosely coupled analysis strategy for efficiently predicting the conjugate heat transfer problems in hypersonic flows. Considering many orders of magnitude disparity of physical characteristic time scales between hypersonic flow behavior and structural heat transfer, a loosely coupled strategy is first developed to efficiently couple an aerodynamic flow computational fluid dynamics solver with a structural heat transfer finite element method solver. Then, an adaptive coupling time stepsize approach based on a control theory point of view is proposed and embedded into this strategy for further efficiency. Finally, the performance of the proposed time-adaptive, loosely coupled analysis strategy is evaluated by performing conjugate heat transfer simulations over a cylindrical leading-edge model. The computational results are presented and analyzed, indicating that this strategy can offer the potential for significant improvements in predicting the long-duration conjugate heat transfer problems in hypersonic flows in terms of efficiency and/or accuracy.