Review on active thermal protection and its heat transfer for airbreathing hypersonic vehicles

Abstract

Hypersonic vehicles with turbojet, ramjet, and scramjet engines are expected to be widely applied to future transportation systems. Due to high-speed flight in the atmosphere, body outer surfaces suffer strong aerodynamic heating, and on the other hand, combustion chamber inter walls are under extremely high temperature and heat flux. Therefore, more efficient and stable active cooling technologies are required in hypersonic vehicles, such as regenerative cooling, film cooling, and transpiration cooling, as well as their combinations. This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on three active cooling methods, i.e., regenerative cooling, film cooling, and transpiration cooling, and deeply analyzes the mechanism of each cooling method, including the fluids flow, heat transfer, and thermal cracking characteristics of different hydrocarbon fuels in regenerative cooling, the heat transfer and flow mechanism of film cooling under supersonic mainstream conditions, and the heat transfer and flow mechanism of transpiration cooling.