Numerical study on thermal and stress responses of an infrared functional window

Hypersonic aerocraft suffers strong aerodynamic forces and serious aerodynamic heating, requiring a more stringent design for infrared window. In order to provide a theoretical guidance for evaluation of the influence of aerodynamic heating and forces on infrared window materials, a finite element analysis of the distributions of thermal and stress fields in the infrared window is presented for hypersonic aerocrafts in this paper. The thermal and stress responses are then investigated under a constant heat flux boundary condition for three different window materials, and distributions of thermal field and stress field are also obtained in this work. Numerical results show that the maximum stress of CVDZnS and sapphire is less than the material mean strength at Mach 6.0, so this two materials are safe in this case.