High-Fidelity Computational Modeling of Fluid-Thermal-Structural Interactions in Hypersonic Air-Breathing Systems

The ability to design of hypersonic air-breathing engines such as ramjets and scramjets remains essential to the U.S. military as it continues to modernize.  Such engines find utilization in hypersonic cruise missiles, as well as hypersonic aircraft.  Key phenomena such as the series of oblique shocks used in the inlet to achieve flow compression before it enters the combustion stage are affected by the coupled fluid/thermal/structural physics.  Often, previous designs considered each physical domain separately and did not capture the fully coupled effects resulting in scramjet designs which could suffer things such as scramjet unstart for off-design conditions which in turn can lead to accidents including asset loss and undesired casualties.  M4 Engineering, Inc., in conjunction with Virginia Tech, will develop and implement improved coupling techniques that will lead to improved air-breathing hypersonic engine design.  The resultant technology will be interfaced with CREATE-AV Kestrel which is one of the modern tools that has had sustained funding from the DoD’s Computational Research & Engineering for Acquisition Tools & Environments (CREATE) program for over fifteen years.  The developed technology will be demonstrated for Navy relevant examples such as those associated with scramjet nozzle design and comparisons will be made against traditional single-physics analyses.