Optimized design of sandwich panels for integral thermal protection systems

This paper proposes a new ITPS panel with special corrugated-core webs which are designed with cutouts for weight saving. The structural design problem was formulated with mass per unit area of the ITPS as the objective function and some functional requirements as constraints. We developed the optimizer fulfilling both thermal and structural functions for minimal areal density. The optimization problem was solved by interpolating the residual error of response surface approximation (RSA) with Radial Basis Function (RBF) to establish the improved RSA (IRSA). The 400 preliminary design points were obtained using Latin Hypercube Sampling method. The quadratic polynomial RSA of the ITPS sandwich panel performance was generated by the least squares method (LSM) based on finite element results and IRSA was used to optimize the constraints. Transient heat transfer, stress and buckling analyses were conducted using finite element method (FEM). Finally, a new ITPS panel with optimal dimensions was obtained. The optimization results show that the areal density of the new ITPS panel decreases by 26.27 % compared with the previous research, which proves the potential of this new design optimization method for the future spacecraft vehicles.