Abstract
The corrugated core sandwich structure is being considered for the Integrated Thermal Protecon System (ITPS) of Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLVs) since it is thermally insulave and has a beer specific loadcarrying capability than convenonal TPS. However, the analyses of the RLVs components such as wings, fuselage, etc., along with the ITPS panel may become computaonally infeasible. This can be resolved by considering the corrugated struc ture as a homogenized orthotropic plate for performing the structural simulaons of such components. However, a thicknesswise temperature gradient can exist in the ITPS during flight condions (such as ascent and reentry phase) and can have significantly different temperature distribuon depending on their posion on the vehicle, which if not incorporated during homogenizaon may render the orthotropic plate properes inaccurate and the results from analysis erroneous. In this work, the homogenizaon method with a thicknesswise temperature gradient is developed to predict the temperature-dependent homogenized properes of the ITPS panel. The novelty of this work is the incorporaon of spaally varying temperature gradient in the homogenous model. The comparisons show that the homogenized plate representaon derived in this work is useful for an accurate and efficient structural analysis.
Keywords: ITPS panel, corrugated core sandwich structures, temperature gradient, homogenizaon.