Integrated Fluid and Materials Modeling of Environmental Barrier Coatings

Hypersonic vehicles undergo extreme temperatures during long-term flight and atmospheric reentry due to the high heat fluxes at high Mach speeds. Ultra-high temperature ceramics (UHTCs) have melting points above 3000°C, making them ideal durability coatings for thermal protection systems (TPS) of composites in the leading edge. NASA and Army are currently evaluating UHTCs (HfB2 and ZrB2) for their hypersonic TPS R&D programs. However, even with enhanced ablation and oxidation resistance, UHTCs will still experience failure, leading to ablation and exposing the ceramic components to extreme heat. Due to the wide design space, experimental performance characterization is limited to the number of samples and level of resolution. In contrast, virtual testing is able to assess the design space efficiently. CFD Research will develop a multi-scale, multi-physics simulation workflow consisting of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), peridynamics (PD), and the Hypersonic Environment Analysis Tool (HEAT). In Phase II CFD and PD were developed to model damage in environmental barrier coatings, and in Ph IIE they will be extended to model UHTCs and linked to HEAT. CFD models the hypersonic flow along the leading edge of a vehicle and will provide the boundary layer conditions with a high level of fidelity. PD models the damage/cracking modes that cause failure at the microscale by solving for the material response to stress over a discretized grid. It will be applied to predict the crack patterns and ablation trends in response to oxidation and thermal stress at the boundary conditions provided by CFD. HEAT is a modeling environment developed to efficiently assess TPS performance at hypersonic conditions on vehicles. Damage and failure results from the CFD/PD simulations will be provided to HEAT in a data-driven module, demonstrating the workflow of coupling microstructural degradation data to evaluation of the durability coating material performance during service.

The simulation framework will be integrated into current NASA programs for predicting material performance in hypersonic environments, facilitating the development of new durability coatings by virtually testing damage resistance of microstructures before fabrication. This will streamline development to the most promising materials for not just hypersonics but also coatings in other extreme environments. The workflow can be integrated into the NASMAT software to extend the capabilities in a platform under development for wider use at NASA.

The simulation framework will also be marketed to DoD agencies (Army, Air Force, and Navy) and OEMs for inclusion in their R&D programs for durability coatings by streamlining experimental fabrication of novel materials. Program managers will be directly contacted to assess their program needs and interest in modeling tools with the goal of inserting the software into their workflow.

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