AEROSPACE SIMULATIONS LABORATORY
Investigation and Numerical Modeling of Active Cooling Concepts for Hypersonic Vehicles
Hypersonic vehicles (e.g., hypersonic cruise vehicles and reentry vehicles) travel in atmosphere at extremely high speeds therefore experience significant amount of aerodynamic heating, which require them to use different types of thermal protection systems (i.e., ablative or re-usable). Our research under this area focus on the investigation of active cooling strategies for reusable TPS applied to critical regions of the hypersonic cruise vehicles (i.e., regions with high thermal loads such as the leading edges). In specific, we focus on the numerical modeling of innovative concepts (e.g., variable transpiration cooling) to investigate the effect of different parameters controlling the design of transpiration cooling system. Our approach is to model transpiration cooling coupled with re-usable TPS material response using high-fidelity simulations (hypersonic high-fidelity CFD coupled with material response models) and use these numerical results along with the experiments to develop reduced order active cooling models that can be used in the conceptual design of hypersonic vehicles. This research is performed in collaboration with Prof. Luca Maddalena and his research group in the University of Texas at Arlington, who also have the capability of testing re-usable or ablative TPS at high-enthalpy flows created in their Arc-Jet facility.
Selected publications on the research topic:
1. S. Gulli, L. Maddalena, and S. Hosder, "Integrated Analysis for the Design of Reusable TPS Based on Variable Transpiration Cooling for Hypersonic Cruise Vehicles (Invited Paper)," 48th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference & Exhibit and 10th International Energy Conversion Engineering Conference, Paper No. AIAA-2012-4161, Atlanta, GA, August 2012.
2. S. Gulli, L. Maddalena, and S. Hosder, "Variable Transpiration Cooling: A New Solution for the Thermal Management of Hypersonic Vehicles," 50th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit, Paper No. AIAA-2012-0221, Nashville, TN, Jan. 2012.
3. S. Gulli, L. Maddalena, and S. Hosder, "Investigation of Transpiration Cooling Effectiveness for Air-Breathing Hypersonic Vehicles," 17th AIAA International Space Planes and Hypersonic Systems and Technologies Conference, Paper No. AIAA-2011-2253, San Francisco, CA, April 2011.