Defect model modification method for thermal protection system with surface heat flux identification

Thermal protection systems (TPS) have become a key issue in ensuring the reliability of hypersonic flights. Aimed at monitoring the thermal loads and possible defects for TPS, a defect model modification method with surface heat flux identification is proposed in this paper. Firstly, by the measured temperature from a distributed sensor network and the initial TPS model, the surface heat flux was identified with the Levenberg–Marquardt Method (LMM). If there existed outliers in the identified heat flux distribution, it can be visually indicated that the defect occurred. Then, defects were represented by shape parameters and can be determined by the model modification from the knowledge of the identified heat flux and the measured temperature. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified numerically using TPS containing a surface defect. Meanwhile, the effects of various factors on the identified results were investigated in detail, such as defect sizes, defect shapes, sensor locations, and real aerodynamic heating. Finally, the proposed method was successfully applied to an experiment, and results demonstrated that the proposed method can achieve good identification results by experimentally measured temperature.