Wide Range Flow and Heat Flux Sensors for In-Flight Flow Characterization

The tracking of critical flow features (CFFs) such as stagnation point, flow separation, shock, and transition in flight provides insight into actual aircraft performance/safety. Sensing of these CFFs across flight regimes involves numerous challenges such as a wide temperature/pressure range from subsonic to hypersonic flows. Tao Systems, Mesoscribe Technologies and Virginia Tech propose to develop a novel direct-write sensor architecture for the in-flight measurement of skin friction and heat flux that is survivable to temperatures exceeding 1000 deg. C while simultaneously providing fast response necessary for real-time signal processing to obtain CFFs. As a consequence, this technology will extend the utility of CFFs for aeroservoelastic control from subsonic to supersonic and hypersonic flows, as well as provide test information from experiments in flight.