Effects of variable wall temperature distributions on 3D boundary layers

High speed flight vehicles typically experience high heating loads to the surface and internal structure during both ascent and descent of the trajectory. It is thus important to understand both the spatial as well as the temporal thermal distribution in these flight regimes. In this paper we present a fully coupled, time accurate fluid-thermal analysis for both the descent and ascent phase of the BOLT sounding rocket experiment. Thermal heating of the solid due to both the laminar and turbulent states of the boundary layer is computed and compared with the experiment. We also investigate the effect of variable heating due to different materials and development of a three-dimensional boundary layer on BOLT.