A method for transient thermal load estimation and its application to identification of aerodynamic heating on atmospheric reentry capsule

The purpose of this work is to formulate a simple method which can be used for the transient thermal load identification. The proposed algorithm can reconstruct the transient temperature distribution in a whole component based on measured temperatures in selected points on the component surface. The presented method may use some commercial heat transfer modelling software. In this work, ANSYS Multiphysics is applied. Two numerical examples of identification of the transient thermal load taken from literature are presented. The determination of the heating process of a simple two-dimensional plate and the recognition of the aerodynamic heating on the atmospheric reentry capsule will demonstrate high accuracy and stability of the proposed algorithm. Future time steps and smoothing filters are used to stabilize the solution of an ill-posed problem. The presented method is easy to use for engineers working in the aerospace or power industry.