Hermann Fasel and colleagues win $350K to analyze rare hypersonic flight data
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research awarded Hermann Fasel, professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, a $350,288 grant to advance understanding of hypersonic flight.
Fasel and AME assistant professors Christoph Hader and James Threadgill will use the funding to carry out a Post-Flight Analysis of the STORT Hypersonic Flight Experiment in collaboration with the German Aerospace Center in Cologne, Germany.
The team will analyze rare hypersonic test data from the STORT flight experiment that the DLR conducted on June 26, 2022, from the Andøya Space launch site in Norway. The test article was carried by a 3-stage rocket, reaching altitude of 40 Km and maximum speed of Mach 8, eight times the speed of sound.
“This award gives us a unique opportunity to study data from a real hypersonic flight experiment rather than relying solely on wind tunnel or computational data,” Fasel said. “That combination is essential for the design and safe operation of future hypersonic flight vehicles.”
A rare window into real-time flight
Hypersonic vehicles – those traveling at Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound or higher – experience extreme surface heat and very large amplitude pressure oscillations, which are difficult to replicate in wind tunnel experiments. Due to high cost and difficulties associated with highly-instrumented hypersonic flight experiments, reliable flight-test data is scarce.
The STORT is one of the few sources of flight data for modern hypersonic vehicle designs, such as those with an ogive forebody – a curved nose shape.
“These configurations are directly relevant to next-generation hypersonic vehicles,” Fasel said. “Having flight data at this level of detail allows us to ask and answer scientific questions that simply wasn’t possible before.”
The team will complete an in-depth post-flight analysis of the STORT experiment and compare the flight results with extensive computational fluid dynamics simulations.
Fasel, an expert in computer simulations and modeling, said that the simulations will help to understand how the state of the flow over the ogive forebody affects the flow downstream in the fin region, where complex phenomena, the so-called shock-boundary layer interactions, occur.
Researchers will be able to compare heat-transfer measurements from flight sensors with predictions from the simulations. Comparison of flight and simulation data will also enable an assessment to what degree the in-flight rolling motion may have affected the relevant flow physics.
The team’s results will be used to bolster the design and development of future hypersonic flight vehicles, that in addition to improved performance are more reliable and safer to operate. This project highlights the College of Engineering’s contributions to international collaborations, including its role as one of the 128 university members of the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonic, a national collaboration between academia, government and industry.
“This project builds on decades of my group’s research in hypersonics at the AME department,” he said. “It positions our team and our students at the forefront of a field that is critically important for our national security and future aerospace technologies.”