Engineering aerothermal analysis for X-34 thermal protection system design

Design of the thermal protection system for any hypersonic flight vehicle r equires determination of both the peak temperatures over the surface and th e heating-rate history along the flight profile, The process used to genera te the time-dependent aerothermal environments for design of the X-34 therm al protection system is described. The process evolved from a relatively si mplistic approach based solely on engineering methods applied to critical a reas to an integrated approach using ground-test data with detailed computa tional and engineering methods to predict the aeroheating over the entire v ehicle. A brief description of the trajectory development leading to the se lection of the thermal protection system design trajectory is included. Com parisons of engineering heating predictions with wind-tunnel test data and with results obtained using a Navier-Stokes flowfield code and an inviscid/ boundary-layer method are Shown. Good agreement is demonstrated among all o f these methods for both the ground-test condition and the peak heating fli ght condition.