Real-Time Simulation of Thermal Protection System in a Hypersonic Environment

Hypersonic weapons are one of the main priorities of the Department of Defense (DoD) activities since China and Russia have such capabilities (e.g. the DF-ZF, designated by Pentagon as the WU-14, is a hypersonic missile delivery vehicle that has been operational by China since 2019).  Due to the importance of these adversarial threats, the Navy, Army, and Air Force have programs for developing hypersonic weapon capabilities.  Synthetic or virtual testing of increasingly complex weapon systems plays a critical role in their success in a battlefield.  In order for warfighters to have a good understanding of the kind of capabilities that advanced technology provides, they need to get their hands on such weapons early during the weapons’ development cycle.  A hardware-in-the-loop simulator (HiLS) will allow warfighters to vet and test a new hypersonic weapon system.  For this reason, the sponsor is developing a system-level HiLS for hypersonic weapons. The proposed research will develop a software simulation for the thermal analysis of a TPS that runs in real-time and encapsulates high fidelity modeling.  The ability to run in real-time is key for integrating it with the Navy’s HiLS that runs on a real-time computational platform.  Developing reduced order modeling (ROM) based on high fidelity simulations for hypersonic vehicles is an effective and realistic approach for meeting the real-time operation requirement.  A ROM approach will provide the foundation for the proposed development.  Available ROM techniques used in hypersonic applications are surrogate based methods and spectral methods for evaluating scalar and time domain quantities, respectively.  Michigan Engineering Services (MES) has utilized both methods in the past for modeling the thermomechanical performance of hypersonic vehicles during a highly iterative design optimization process and for considering the variance in the material properties to the performance attributes of the vehicle.  The ability to seed the simulation software with experimental data from real TPS sections will be part of the new development.  In this manner, experimental results will be included in the development of the ROM.  The Base Phase I effort will perform research in three areas: (i) develop a framework for real-time simulation of TPS in a hypersonic environment; (ii) development of a test plan for advanced TPS materials for experimentally determining the input to the TPS simulation environment; (iii) develop the software architecture for integrating the new software into the Navy’s system level test architecture.  The Option will implement the software data structure in C++ code in order to accommodate the integration with the sponsor’s HiLS.