Abstract:
To monitor inreal time the thickness of the thermal protection structures (TPS) encapsulating the re-entry capsules, this paperproposes a method using the guided wave velocity as a factor to represent the thickness, based on thecorrelation between the wave velocity and the thickness ofthe ablation layer of TPS. The modes and the frequencies are selected based on the frequency dispersion curve and the thickness sensitivity curve, and the thickness loss of the ablation layer is evaluated for highly efficient and high-precision monitoring of the ablation layer thickness in real time. Both the FE simulations and the experiments are performed to validate the effectiveness of this method.