Fabien BARRIER, Kevin HARAS, Guillaume PELLETIER, Isabel DA COSTA, Thomas LE PICHON
DOI Number: N/A
Conference number: HiSST-2025-310
Design, fabrication and validation of Thermal Protection Systems (TPS) is a key process when designing an airbreathing hypersonic flight vehicle. It requires tools with high-predictive capacity to dimension and optimize the TPS, a detailed knowledge of the materials properties and their forming techniques and ground-based test rigs to replicate thermal loads that the vehicle will experience during its flight. Recently ONERA and ArianeGroup have combined their know-how, tools and experiences to build a specific TPS used in an innovative actively cooled combustor. The design of the combustor has been based on past experience and its optimization was achieved with the aid of the CFD software CEDRE.
As a part of the combustor is actively cooled with the effusion cooling technique, a dedicated model, which has been developed and implemented in the CFD code in a preliminary phase, has been used. Parts of the combustor were manufactured with a CMC material: they were designed from 3D carbon textures and densified via gaseous deposits. These components enable complex geometries (such as tapped holes, for example) as well as large sizes (over 1m on this application). The resulting C/SiC materials possess thermomechanical properties and resistance to oxidizing atmospheres allowing them to withstand several thousand seconds on airbreathing propulsion applications. The low density (around 2) of CMC parts makes it possible to achieve particularly unique performances. Finally, long-duration direct-connected tests have been performed in various flight-like conditions to demonstrate the effectiveness and the robustness of this new combustor. This successful proof of concept has provided results that will enable enhancement of the entire numerical and experimental approach, integrating lessons learned, and enable future improvements of the TPS.