Optimal Sensor Placement of Health Management for Thermal Protection System on RLV

Abstract

Abstract When a Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) travels through the atmosphere there should be strong aero heating around it, so a Thermal Protection System (TPS) would be used to protect the vehicle structures from aero thermal ablation. However, the TPS structure may fail more frequently than normal vehicle structures because of the severe environment and load conditions, while a TPS failure can even lead to a catastrophic breakdown of vehicle structures. To keep the RLV safe, the TPS must be monitored real-time. To learn the heat transfer inside a ceramic TPS tile finite element models are built, and computation made with them indicates that temperature monitoring and frequency monitoring of the TPS structure should be effectual for fault detection. Health management for TPS is one of the key technologies for space vehicle. The paper puts forward a method that analyze and valuation the system states by monitoring the key function index sign of TPS. The concept of health management for Thermal Protection System of space shuttle and the principles of health monitoring are introduced. The principles of sensor selection and layout optimization method for TPS Health Management are discussed.