Efficient reduced-order modeling for skin panels in hypersonic flow and its application to generating aerothermoelastic scaling laws

This study describes the development of an efficient aerothermoelastic computational framework and its application to aerothermoelastic scaling law development. In the framework, a novel approach is developed for the reduced order model of the fluid solver, which accounts for non-uniform temperature distribution and geometrical scales using simple analytical pointwise models. The framework also features the linearized stability analysis and a tightly-coupled scheme, which are used for rapid aerothermoelastic simulation of extended flight time, and efficient identification of stability boundary. Subsequently, a new, two-pronged approach to aerothermoelastic scaling is presented. It combines the classical scaling approach with augmentation from numerical simulations of the specific problem. This enables one to obtain useful scaling information for important quantities that cannot be treated by the classical approach. Finally, the framework is applied to the development of a scaling law for a simple hypersonic skin panel configuration.