An Integrated Aerodynamic/Thermal/Structural Design Framework for Hypersonic Vehicles

Hypersonic vehicle is playing a more and more important role in military and other high-technology fields. However, traditional serial design procedure is inefficient and is not adequate for hypersonic vehicles. This paper proposes an integrated aerodynamic/thermal/structural design framework for hypersonic vehicles. It takes aerodynamic force, aerodynamic heating, heat transfer and structure deformation into account together, which can achieve a more realistic design during the conceptual or preliminary design phase. An integrated aerodynamic/thermal/structure analysis method is developed, in which the piston theory, reference temperature method and finite element method (FEM) are applied for the calculation of aerodynamic force, aerodynamic heating, heat transfer and structure static analysis. The parametric modeling is used to modify the shape and structure size conveniently and consistently. Then the integrated optimization for aerodynamic shape parameters and structure sizes of the model in strictest results of aerothermoelastic analysis is performed to obtain the optimal design parameters. Genetic algorithm is used for the optimization for this integrated optimization. An invalid initial solution turned into a valid solution through the integrated optimization framework proposed in this paper. Besides, a better result evaluated by the combination of structure weight and lift-drag ratio was achieved by the integrated optimization framework for this model by 2.31%.