Hypersonic Aerothermoelastic Response Prediction of Skin Panels Using Computational Fluid Dynamic Surrogates

Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) surrogates are developed to efficiently compute the aerodynamic heating and unsteady pressure loads for a structurally and thermally compliant skin panel in hypersonic flow. In order to minimize the computational overhead, the surrogates are constructed using steady-state CFD flow analysis. Unsteady terms in the aerodynamic pressure are incorporated using piston theory. The surrogates are compared to both analytical modeling (i.e., piston theory and Eckerts methods) and Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes CFD predictions of the aerothermodynamic loads for representative panel responses. Results indicate that the surrogates accurately and efficiently reproduce CFD predictions for the aerothermodynamic loads. Comparisons of the dynamic aerothermoelastic panel response using the surrogates with previous results using analytical approaches reveal differences of over 100% in the onset time to flutter, and significantly altered post-flutter responses. The CFD surrogates are found to enable a reasonably accurate, robust, and efficient method for incorporating CFD loads prediction, which would otherwise be impractical, into a long time-record aerothermoelastic analysis of structures for a complete hypersonic trajectory.