Thermal Analysis of a High-Speed Aircraft Wing Using p-Version Finite Elements

This paper presents the results of conceptual level thermal analyses of a High Speed Civil Transport (HSCT) wing using p-version finite elements. The work was motivated by a thermal analysis of a HSCT wing structure which showed the importance of radiation heat transfer throughout the structure. The analysis also showed that refining a traditional finite element mesh to accurately capture the temperature distribution on the internal structure led to very large meshes with unacceptably long execution times. Further study indicated using p-version finite elements might improve computation performance for this class of problem. Methods for determining internal radiation heat transfer were then developed and demonstrated on test problems representative of the geometry found in an aircraft wing structure. This paper presents the results of the application of these new methods to the analysis of a high speed aircraft wing. Results for both a wing box model as well as a full wing model are presented. 'Me reduced wing box model allows for a comparison of the traditional finite element method with mesh refinement (h-refinement) to the new p-version finite elements while the full wing model demonstrates the applicability and efficiency of p-version finite elements for large models.