Decoupled Method for Reconstruction of Surface Conditions From Internal Temperatures On Ablative Materials With Uncertain Recession Model
Obtaining measurements of flight environments on ablative heat shields is both critical for spacecraft development and extremely challenging due to the harsh heating environment and surface recession. Thermocouples installed several millimeters below the surface are commonly used to measure the heat shield temperature response, but an ill-posed inverse heat conduction problem must be solved to reconstruct the surface heating environment from these measurements. Ablation can contribute substantially to the measurement response making solutions to the inverse problem strongly dependent on the recession model, which is often poorly characterized. To enable efficient surface reconstruction for recession model sensitivity analysis, a method for decoupling the surface recession evaluation from the inverse heat conduction problem is presented. The decoupled method is shown to provide reconstructions of equivalent accuracy to the traditional coupled method but with substantially reduced computational effort. These methods are applied to reconstruct the environments on the Mars Science Laboratory heat shield using diffusion limit and kinetically limited recession models.
Development and Verification of the Charring, Ablating Thermal Protection Implicit System Simulator
The development and verification of the Charring Ablating Thermal Protection Implicit System Solver is presented. This work concentrates on the derivation and verification of the stationary grid terms in the equations that govern three-dimensional heat and mass transfer for charring thermal protection systems including pyrolysis gas flow through the porous char layer. The governing equations are discretized according to the Galerkin finite element method with first and second order implicit time integrators. The governing equations are fully coupled and are solved in parallel via Newton's method, while the fully implicit linear system is solved with the Generalized Minimal Residual method. Verification results from exact solutions and the Method of Manufactured Solutions are presented to show spatial and temporal orders of accuracy as well as nonlinear convergence rates.
Heat Transfer Analysis in Cooling System of Hydropower’s Generator
Cooling process of power plant generator is handled via air-cooled radiators in which the cooling water is supplied from lake with its water temperature varies from season to season. In this study, the effect of temperature fluctuations of cooling water entering the cooling system has been examined via analysis of energy (NTU method) and exergy. The exergy analysis has been done by definition of efficiency coefficient for exergy of cooling media (water) and heating media (air). Besides, the effect of changing the cooling water temperature and flow rate entering the radiators on the cooling system performance has been studied. The results revealed the generator cooling system performance level held sufficient till the temperature of inlet water was kept under 293 k (20°C). On one hand, when the temperature of cooling water at the inlet rises to 12°C, the rate of heat exchange at radiators falls up to 34.3%. On the other hand, by water temperature passing the 12°C limit, the efficiency of cooling media exergy falls to 78% leading to efficiency rise in radiators’ heating media exergy level to 61%. According to the results of this study, changing flow rate of cooling media up to 40% gives rise to the efficiency coefficient of radiators’ cooling media exergy level to about 18.7%. While it does not affect the efficiency level of energy at radiators, the flow rate rise of cooling media may not be considered as a way to give rise to efficiency level of radiators.