Publications
Coupling strategies for high-speed aeroheating problems
A common purpose for performing an aerodynamic analysis is to calculate the resulting loads on a solid body immersed in the flow. Pressure or heat loads are often of interest for characterizing the structural integrity or thermal survivability of the structure. This document describes two algorithms for tightly coupling the mass, momentum and energy conservation equations for a compressible fluid and the energy conservation equation for heat transfer through a solid. We categorize both approaches as monolithically coupled, where the conservation equations for the fluid and the solid are assembled into a single residual vector. Newton's method is then used to solve the resulting nonlinear system of equations. These approaches are in contrast to other popular coupling schemes such as staggered coupling methods were each discipline is solved individually and loads are passed between as boundary conditions, and demonstrates the viability of the monolithic approach for aeroheating problems.