THERMOMECHANICAL COUPLING EFFECTS AT HIGH FLIGHT SPEEDS

A comparative numerical study of the coupled vs uncoupled thermal-stru ctural analysis of viscoplastic structures is presented for supersonic and hypersonic flight speeds. in this study, deformations are assumed to be infinitesimal, and the viscoplastic behavior is described by us ing a unified constitutive model. The Galerkin finite element method i s utilized along with a time-marching scheme to predict the quasistati c thermomechanical behavior of inelastic structures with rate and temp erature-dependent material properties. In the coupled analysis, the di splacements and temperature distribution at every time step are comput ed at once by solving the system of equations directly. The results in dicate that the magnitude of coupling decreases with the increase in t emperature and the decrease in internal dissipation.