Thermo-Mechanical Modeling of Metastructured Hypersonic Panels and Shells

Hypersonic airframes are subjected to severe thermo-mechanical environments in which aerothermal heating, steep temperature gradients, dynamic pressure fluctuations, and lightweight structural requirements act simultaneously on load-bearing panels and shell-like components. Conventional design strategies based only on increased thickness, passive insulation, or con¬servative material choices may be inefficient, because they add mass while leaving vibration amplification, resonance crossings, and thermally induced instabilities only partially controlled. This work investigates metamaterial-inspired architectures for hypersonic applications, with particular attention to periodic cores embedded within representative stiffened panels and cylindrical shell sections. The internal region of the skin-stiffener assembly is replaced by periodic architected cells, so that stiffness, inertia distribution, and wave-filtering capability can be tailored at the structural level. A Carrera Unified Formulation (CUF) finite element framework is adopted to model the coupled response with refined kinematics, retaining the three-dimensional features of local unit-cell dynamics while avoiding the excessive cost of full solid discretizations. The proposed framework is applied to flat and curved Inconel 617 honeycomb panels subjected to a hypersonic-relevant through-the-thickness thermal gradient. The results provide a first assessment of thermally induced displacements and of the sensitivity of the response to shell curvature.