New Methods in Heat Flow Analysis With Application to Flight Structures+

New methods are presented for the analysis of transient heat flow in complex structures, leading to drastic simplifications in the calculation and the possibility of including nonlinear and surface effects. These methods are in part a direct application of some general variational principles developed earlier for linear thermodynamics.1-3 They are further developed in the particular case of purely thermal problems to include surface and boundary-layer heat transfer, nonlinear systems with temperature-dependent parameters, and radiation. The concepts of thermal potential, dissipation function, and generalized thermal force are introduced, leading to ordinary differential equations of the Lagrangian type for the thermal flow field. Because of the particular nature of heat flow phenomena, compared with dynamics, suitable procedures must be developed in order to formulate each problem in the simplest way. This is done by treating a number of examples. The concepts of penetration depth and transit time are introduced and discussed in connection with onedimensional flow. Application of the general method to the heating of a slab, with temperature-dependent heat capacity, shows a substantial difference between the heating and cooling processes. An example of heat flow analysis of a supersonic wing structure by the present method is also given and requires only extremely simple calculations. The results are found to be in good agreement with those obtained by the classical and much more elaborate procedures.