Published: Oct 30, 2019 by Daning Huang
Abstract: Airbreathing hypersonic flight has the potential to revolutionize global transportation and has been one of the last frontiers in the aerospace industry for over seven decades. Unlike conventional commercial aircraft, air-breathing hypersonic vehicles are naturally interdisciplinary: the aerodynamic, structural and thermal responses are tightly coupled. One of the unresolved technical challenges is the lack of hypersonic aerothermoelastic scaling laws for conducting aerothermoelastic testing. Once such scaling laws were available, the flight test data obtained on scaled models could be extrapolated to full-size vehicles, resulting in a dramatic cost reduction in the development of hypersonic vehicles. I would like to present my work for achieving “incomplete” similarity using a novel two-pronged methodology, which combines the classical scaling approach with augmentation from numerical simulations of the specific aerothermoelastic problem. First, an efficient aerothermoelastic computational framework is developed. The framework adopts a novel technique that enables the extrapolation of surrogate-based interpolative reduced-order aerodynamic models and achieves computational acceleration by four orders of magnitude. The framework also features the linearized stability analysis for efficient identification of aerothermoelastic stability boundary and a tightly-coupled scheme for rapid aerothermoelastic simulation of extended flight time. On top of the framework, the development of new aerothermoelastic scaling laws is formulated in the form of a constrained optimization problem, which is solved using a Bayesian optimization approach. The two-pronged approach is applied to the aerothermoelastic scaling of skin panels. Finally, the ongoing and future research projects in Daning Huang’s lab will be discussed.