ABSTRACT
The present study focuses on the simulation of the aero-thermal interaction between the flow field surrounding a re-entry vehicle and its thermal protection system (TPS). An interface tool has been developed to couple computational fluid-dynamics (CFD) results and thermo-structural simulations in order to evaluate the actual thermal loads acting on the structure along the re-entry trajectory. In order to show the efficiency of the developed tool, this technique has been applied to a meaningful two-dimensional test case, using MSC-Nastran as thermo-structural code. It is remarkable that, even though the presented model is two-dimensional, the above interface procedure has been developed to be applied to both 2D and 3D cases.