| Description |
Over the last few decades, aerothermoelasticity has become an ever increasingly important area of study. This has been most notably influenced by the development of hypersonic aircraft that surpass Mach 3. At such speeds, the elastic response of an aircraft to the aerodynamic heating and loading becomes very important. This thesis presents the aerothermoelastic model of a three-dimensional generic hypersonic vehicle using ANSYS® Advanced Academic Teaching, release 11.0. ANSYS® CFX, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, allows for coupled thermalfluid-structural interaction. The hypersonic vehicle geometry used in this study is similar to the NASA X-43A research hypersonic vehicle. The total number of elements for the three-dimensional geometry was 14,988; whereas the total number of elements for the three-dimensional fluid domain was 1,269,878. A model that includes propulsion in the form of scramjet combustion is also presented. For the combustion case, the fluid domain has 1,848,436 elements. For both cases, the freestream conditions for the simulations are the same as those of atmosphere at an altitude of 30km. |
