Mesostructure Scramjet Combustor Panel (MESCOP)

With the rapid development of material science and manufacturing engineering, numerous complex structures are constructed and applied in diverse engineering fields. Mesostructures produced by additive manufacturing techniques have shown to ability to significantly reduce weight and tune effective material properties.  For this reason, mesostructures have become increasingly popular for weight critical industries such as hypersonics. For this SBIR, the Air Force is interested in the design of a hypersonic component using mesostructures to improve manufacturability, maneuverability, speed, and range.  To address this critical need, X-wave Innovations, Inc. proposes to develop a mesostructure scramjet combustor panel (MESCOP) using a nonuniform unit cell size lattice.  The proposed MESCOP will improve the thermal and mechanical properties of the combustor panel to reduce the chance of coking as well as improve the efficiency of the cooling process of regenerative-cooled scramjet engines.  The MESCOP will be constructed using optimized triply periodic minimal surfaces as well as octree discretization for a nonuniform lattice structure.  The nonuniform lattice results in a further optimized structure beyond that of a uniform mesostructure lattice.  The octree discretization, where the unit cell sizes are varied throughout the geometry, provides the ability to map the optimization to any existing or future geometry.