Ph.D. Proposal

Brian J. Burke 

(Advisor: Prof. Kennedy)

"High-Fidelity Multidisciplinary Optimization of Aerospace Vehicles Subject to Path-Dependent Thermal Constraints"

Wednesday, February 12 

10:00 a.m. 

Montgomery Knight Building 317

Abstract

High-Mach flight offers numerous benefits: reduced cost of space access, faster commercial travel, munitions with shorter response times and increased survivability, and—for high hypersonic—understanding of atmospheric re-entry. These benefits are contingent on several areas of application including air-breathing propulsion, aero(thermo)dynamics, configuration, and airframe structures. These challenges are connected through one of the defining characteristics of the high supersonic and low hypersonic regime: the dominance of aerodynamic heating in the physics of high-Mach flows. Aerodynamic heating poses constraints on a vehicle through (1.) allowable local heating at any given time and (2.) integrated thermal loads across a trajectory, leading to path-dependent thermal constraints. Because the physics in the high-Mach regime is highly coupled between various disciplines, including fluid-thermal-structural interactions, a multidisciplinary approach is required to accurately simulate vehicles traveling in this regime. Furthermore, the design of these vehicles requires the engineer to incorporate cross-discipline sensitivities which significantly affect vehicle performance. Given the tight constraints required to even achieve high-Mach flight, efficient numerical optimization of these systems becomes essential. High-fidelity gradient-based multidisciplinary optimization approaches offer an attractive method for design of these high-performance systems, with incorporation of path-dependent thermal constraints a necessary component to vehicle success. To accomplish these goals, contributions by the author include: development of the theoretical framework of FUNtoFEM for aerothermoelastic coupling and its extension to other disciplines; adding a radiative heat transfer discipline to the FUNtoFEM framework; the development of efficient coupling approaches and solution methods for aeroelastic, aerothermal, and aerothermoelastic analyses and optimizations; integrating an inexpensive method for the estimation of thermal loads during high-Mach flight; application of summation-by-parts operators for robust computational fluid dynamics on unstructured meshes; and efficient multidisciplinary trajectory optimization of space launch vehicles at various levels of fidelity.

Committee

· Prof. Graeme J. Kennedy – School of Aerospace Engineering (advisor)

· Prof. Marilyn J. Smith – School of Aerospace Engineering

· Prof. Joseph Oefelein – School of Aerospace Engineering

· Prof. Kai A. James – School of Aerospace Engineering

· Dr. William C. Tyson – Naval Air Warfare Center, Aircraft Division