Conjugate heat transfer study of hypersonic flow past a cylindrical leading edge composed of functionally graded materials

Abstract

Aero-thermodynamic analysis of a cylindrical leading edge placed in a hypersonic stream is carried out using an in-house developed conjugate heat transfer (CHT) solver. Isotropic and functionally graded materials (FGM) are tested as heat shields to understand the effects of the material property on the flow structure and aerodynamic heating associated with the mutual coupling of fluid flow and heat transfer. A simplified partitioned approach is employed to couple the independently developed fluid flow and heat transfer solvers to perform conjugate heat transfer studies. This framework employs a cell-centred finite volume formulation with an edge-based algorithm. Both strong and loose coupling algorithms are implemented for the data transfer across the fluid–solid interface. A test case of hypersonic flow over a cylindrical leading edge composed of an isotropic material is considered to validate the accuracy and correctness of numerical formulation adopted in the in-house solver. The significance of solid domain materials on the conjugate heat transfer has been studied by considering both isotropic material and FGM. The loosely coupled CHT solver required 10 times less simulation time when compared with the strongly coupled CHT solver. The interface heat flux evolution over time showed a decreasing trend, whereas an increasing trend was for the interface temperature. The current study strongly recommends CHT analysis for the design of thermal protection system of space vehicles. The thermal performance of FGMs composed of various volume fractions of Zirconia and Titanium alloy (Ti6Al4V) is assessed. The temperature distributions obtained from the CHT analysis shows that FGM with a power index of unity is a good material choice for thermal protection systems.