The design of the wing structure for a suborbital tourist-class reusable spacecraft represents a complex scientific and engineering challenge that requires comprehensive thermal design. Due to the lack of reference data in open sources, one of the key objectives of this study was to determine the thermophysical properties of the carbon fiber reinforced plastic used in the wing skin of the tourist-class reusable spacecraft. The computational values of the carbon fiber reinforced plastic's thermal conductivity were obtained based on the multiscale modeling of heat transfer processes in a representative volume element using the Digimat software suite. To validate the mathematical models, a series of computational and experimental studies were conducted on samples manufactured using the vacuum infusion method. The thermal conductivity transverse to the reinforcement plane was determined by the laser flash method, while the in-plane thermal conductivity was obtained by solving a three-dimensional inverse heat conduction problem in Comsol Multiphysics, utilizing thermal imaging data from a contact heating setup. The comparison of the computational and experimental data demonstrated good agreement (with a discrepancy within 10 percent), which confirms the validity of the proposed models and justifies their application for assessing the thermal state and further designing the load-bearing structure of the wing for the tourist-class reusable spacecraft.

EDN HOJOIB