Development of an Aerothermal Modeling and Simulation Code for Hypersonic Applications

Corvid and Leidos are partnering to create HAVOC (Hypersonic Aerothermostructural Vehicle-Oriented Coupling), an automated computational tool designed to analyze vehicle TPS (Thermal Protection Systems) through hypersonic trajectories. HAVOC employs high fidelity CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) solvers to capture the complex physics that define hypersonic flight and a vehicleÆs response throughout a trajectory. Aerodynamic heating at high speeds results in surface thermochemistry as well as material temperature rise, leading to reduce material strength and thermal expansion, and nonlinear material responses to thermal and aerodynamic loads. Vehicle shape change then impacts aerodynamics and aeroheating, creating a need for a coupled workflow for analyzing hypersonic vehicle TPS.HAVOC builds upon the state-of-the-art workflow of using film coefficient and recovery state to define aeroheating boundary conditions for a transient thermal model of a hypersonic trajectory to include automatically updated CFD and FEA grids that respond to the changing shape of the vehicle. The result is a hands-off high fidelity tool that can predict TPS response to hypersonic flight in a fraction of the time and man-hour cost of previous tools.