Conjugate Heat Transfer Analysis for a Finite Thickness Cylinder in a Hypersonic Flow

Prediction of surface heating rates is of prime importance for the hypersonic flow regime. Experimental and conventional computational efforts overlook the heat transfer phenomenon in the solid due to the rigid assumptions involved in the solution methodologies. In order to address this fact, conjugate heat transfer (CHT) studies are carried out using various coupling techniques to examine their implementation abilities. Three types of solution methodologies are adopted, namely, decoupled, strongly coupled, and loosely coupled analysis. This study is also focused on looking into the effect of a hypersonic flow field on wall heat flux for a finite thickness insulating cylinder at moderately large time scales. Increase in wall temperature and decrease in surface heat flux have been noticed using strong and loose coupling techniques with an increase in simulation time. Decoupled fluid and solid domain analysis is found to be useful for typical shock tunnel test durations (～1 ms) while investigations with loose coupling techniques are advisable for time scales corresponding to flight testing (～1 s). Efforts are also made to reason the discrimination in prediction of stagnation point heat flux using conventional computational and experimental analysis.