Loosely Coupled Fluid–Thermal-Ablation Analysis Strategy Based on Dynamic Flight Trajectory

In the context of designing supersonic and hypersonic missiles, it becomes imperative to conduct aerodynamic heating analyses, a task demanding time-dependent conjugate heat transfer (CHT) analyses that can be computationally expensive. This study introduces a time-efficient, loosely coupled fluid–structural thermal analysis method, tailored to the time-dependent flight trajectory. Loosely coupled analysis solves the fluid and structural equations independently and exchanges data at the interface between the two domains. To validate its efficacy, this proposed method is implemented on two distinct missile configurations with separate flight scenarios. The time-dependent temperature data, acquired through the loosely coupled analysis, are compared against results from the tightly coupled approach, actual flight data, and other established reference sources. Additionally, an ablation method using the heat of ablation formulation is coupled to the aerodynamic heating to approximately compute the recession. Also, a test problem is solved to validate the ablation method. The outcomes of this investigation reveal highly promising results. The findings of this research underscore the potential of the loosely coupled analysis strategy as a promising approach for conducting trajectory-based aerodynamic heating analyses of supersonic and hypersonic missiles. Notably, this approach offers reduced computational demand compared to the tightly coupled approach while maintaining the accuracy of the results.