An Integrated CFD, Guidance, and Control Approach with Heating Considerations

This work presents an integrated framework for simulating controlled trajectories of hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) that couples high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with conjugate heat transfer (CHT) and integrated guidance and control (IG\&C). By using high-fidelity CFD as feedback within closed-loop controls, this framework enables the generation of optimized trajectories under coupled aerothermodynamic effects. A loosely coupled one-dimensional CHT solver captures transient wall heating along the vehicle surface, while aerodynamic forces and moments are obtained from CFD and augmented by surrogate models for gradient and trim computations. The study demonstrates that integrating CFD in-the-loop with controls reveals discrepancies relative to traditional database-based methods, affecting controller stability, trim, and trajectory feasibility. Dynamic pressure tracking studies show that transient heating can meaningfully alter closed-loop behavior. The time-varying model predictive control, based on a linearized model of the HGV dynamics, requires a sampling time of 10~ms. To reduce the number of CFD evaluations needed at this sampling frequency, appropriate approximations of aerodynamic forces, moments, and heating are used during trimmed flight. The results highlight the importance of consistent physics modeling across all components of the IG\&C framework and provide a foundation for future efforts: incorporate aerothermal constraints into guidance, quantify unsteady effects in controlled hypersonic flight simulations. This framework represents a step toward leveraging high-fidelity, coupled physics-based solvers for multidisciplinary optimization and design of hypersonic systems.