Design of Aerospace Vehicles’ Thermal Protection Based on Heat-Insulating Materials with Optimal Structure

Abstract

Highly porous open-cell carbon materials have great potential for use as high-temperature thermal insulation for space vehicles due to a unique combination of properties: low density, high rigidity, sufficient compressive strength, and low thermal conductivity. The physical properties of these materials essentially depend on their microstructure. This implies the possibility of constructing a new advanced technique for the optimal design of multilayer thermal protection systems for aerospace vehicles, taking into account the dependence of materials’ thermal properties on microstructure. The formulation of the optimization problem traditional to thermal design implies the determination of the layer thicknesses that provide a minimum specific mass of the thermal protection, subject to the specified constraints on the maximum temperatures in the layers. The novelty of this work lies in the fact that, along with the thickness of the layers, the design parameters include the cell diameter and porosity, which characterize the structure of highly porous cellular materials. The innovative part of the presented paper lies in the determination of cell diameter and the porosity of open-cell carbon foam together with the thickness of the layers for multilayer thermal insulation, ensuring the required operational temperature on the boundaries of the layers and a minimum of the total mass of the system. This article reveals new possibilities for using the numerical optimization method to determine the geometric parameters of the thermal protection system and the morphology of the materials used. A new methodology for designing heat-loaded structures based on the simultaneous selection of macro- and micro-parameters of the system is proposed. The basic principles of constructing an algorithm for designing a multilayer thermal protection system are outlined, taking into account the possibility of choosing the parameters of the highly porous materials’ structure. The reliability of the developed optimization method was verified by comparing the results of mathematical modeling with experimental data obtained for highly porous cellular materials with known microstructure parameters.