Environmental Sensors for High Speed Airframes

Military analysts contended that the United States must maintain and enhance its long-range strike capability so that it can strike anywhere in the world with forces that are either based in the U.S. or overseas, using hypersonic weapons. For such high speed platforms, environmental sensors will be needed to reliably sense the transition to sustained hypersonic flight, with the objective of making a valid and reliable flight determination that will then be used to enable or activate a payload, as in a safe & arm mode, for arming onboard munitions. Such environmental sensors, for hypersonic vehicles, do not currently exist. Innoveerings MESH system leverages a novel aero-acoustic property sensing approach to uniquely determine flight conditions of a hypersonic (M3-M6+) airframe. We believe the military potential of our SBIR Phase I results are positive, because our Phase I results showed that our sensors geometry can be designed to a specific Mach #. With no moving parts and a simple manufacturing approach, our MESH system has the potential to integrate with a hypersonic airframe, non-intrusively interrogate the flowfield while surviving the heat loads and performing its environmental flight validation functions for a military weapons platform.