Microvascular composite skin panels for hypersonic aircraft

This study presents the experimental assessment and computational design of a 3D woven, actively cooled, microvascular composite panel with embedded microchannels for hypersonic aircraft applications. On the experimental side, we investigate the active cooling performance and mechanical properties of the microvascular plate for two channel architectures. In the first one, four microchannels are located in the mid-plane of the plate; in the second, eight channels are placed close to the top and bottom surfaces. A four-point bending test is used to evaluate the stiffness of the samples. On the numerical side, we present an h- and p-adaptive extension of the Interface-enriched Generalized Finite Element Method (IGFEM), a numerical scheme specially developed to predict the thermal response of actively-cooled microvascular structural components using finite element discretizations that do not conform with the micro-channel geometry, thereby providing a very efficient computational design tool. The multi-physics IGFEM thermal solver is then combined with a gradient-based scheme, taking advantage of the stationary nature of the non-conforming mesh, which greatly simplifies the extraction of the design sensitivity values. Various numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the method.