Enhanced Pre-cooling Heat Exchangers for High Mach Flight

ABSTRACT: Hypersonic vehicles have the capability to provide the United States Air Force with the mission capabilities needed to meet their core missions of air and space superiority, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), rapid global mobility, global strike, and command and control.Current hypersonic vehicles require a first stage to propel the aircraft to flight speeds and a second stage to maintain speed.The combination of these stages increases complexity of the vehicle and reduces the mission readiness of the vehicle.To reduce complexity, a single propulsion system that can propel the aircraft from takeoff to flight speed is required to meet this goal with turbojet engines being the most conducive to this task.However, due to the high stagnation temperature at flight speeds above Mach 2, the turbojet engine cannot sustain hypersonic flight without a precooler heat exchanger to reduce the temperature of the inlet air to the turbojet engine.Advanced Cooling Technologies, Inc., in collaboration with GoHypersonic, Inc. propose to develop a compact, lightweight, precooler to enable turbojet propulsion from takeoff to hypersonic speeds.During the Phase I effort, ACT and GHI will design and evaluate the proposed heat exchanger system and its impact on vehicle performance.; BENEFIT: The proposed heat exchanger technology will provide the heat rejection necessary to enable turbojet propulsion systems in hypersonic vehicles and increase the mission readiness and capability of hypersonic vehicles for defense applications.If successful, the proposed heat exchanger technology, developed by Advanced Cooling Technologies, Inc., will be licensed to GoHypersonic, Inc. for fabrication and integration into hypersonic vehicles.