Numerical investigation of aerodynamic heating by electron transpiration cooling coupling magnetohydrodynamic on hypersonic flow

During atmospheric reentry, hypersonic vehicles are subjected to extreme aerodynamic heating on the surface, which may lead to deformation of the aerodynamic shape. An effective thermal protection system is essential to overcome these challenging thermal environments. In this study, magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) and electron transpiration cooling (ETC) are integrated into the non-equilibrium Navier–Stokes (N–S) equations to assess their combined performance. The novel thermal protection approach is called magnetohydrodynamic coupling electron transpiration cooling (METC) using OpenFOAM software. The aerodynamic thermal protection effectiveness of the METC method is analyzed. The effects of material thermionic emission properties, including emissivity (ε) and work function (ϕ), on thermal protection performance are further investigated. Results demonstrate that METC combines the advantages of MHD in reducing wall heat flux and ETC in lowering wall temperature. Compared with ETC, METC reduces the stagnation point heat flux by 29.4% and achieves a 9.1% reduction in stagnation point temperature relative to MHD. As ε increases from 0.2 to 1.0, the wall heat flux remains nearly unchanged, while the ETC flux (qETC) decreases by 51.5%, at the stagnation point. An increase from 1 to 2.25 results in a 17.6% decrease in stagnation point heat flux and a relative 62.6% decrease in qETC at the same location. The distributions of temperature and Mach number along the stagnation point line axis are only slightly influenced by the parameters ε and ϕ. These results provide novel insights into the design of advanced thermal protection strategies for hypersonic vehicles.