Analytic estimation and numerical modeling of actively cooled thermal protection systems with nickel alloys

Actively cooled thermal protection system has great influence on the engine of a hypersonic vehicle, and it is significant to obtain the thermal and stress distribution in the system. So an analytic estimation and numerical modeling are performed in this paper to investigate the behavior of an actively cooled thermal protection system. The analytic estimation is based on the electric analogy method and finite element analysis (FEA) is applied to the numerical simulation. Temperature and stress distributions are obtained for the actively cooled channel walls with three kinds of nickel alloys with or with no thermal barrier coating (TBC). The temperature of the channel wall with coating has no obvious difference from the one with no coating, but the stress with coating on the channel wall is much smaller than that with no coating. Inconel X-750 has the best characteristics among the three Ni-based materials due to its higher thermal conductivity, lower elasticity module and greater allowable stress. Analytic estimation and numerical modeling results are compared with each other and a reasonable agreement is obtained.