All -Optical Hypersonic Vehicle Sensor System Architecture for Combustion System and Airframe Health Monitoring

The realization of practical aircraft utilizing air-breathing, liquid-fueled SCRAMJET propulsion systems requires an extensive sensor system development effort. Catastrophic failure can occur due to a wide variety of conditions including combustion maladies such as "unstart" and lean blow off, and airframe integrity can easily be compromised due to excessively high skin temperature and strain at high MACH number. Developing a sensor system architecture that can detect the onset of these conditions for feedback control will be critical to successful development of practical SCRAMJET systems. Zolo Technologies proposes the development of an all-optical sensor system that uses fiber-optic technology as a backbone to monitor the onset of adverse operating conditions such as "unstart" and lean blow off as well as monitoring skin temperature, strain, vehicle position and attitude at up to kHz update rates. It will incorporate both passive (optical emission) and active (laser absorption) optical sensing. Advantages of an all-optical architecture include: flexibility, fiber-coupled robustness, noise and EMP immunity, and the leveraging of heavy investment in telecommunications.