A Rapid Aerodynamic Prediction Tool for Maneuvering Hypersonic Air Vehicles

Research in Flight and Utah State University are proposing the development of a rapid aerodynamic prediction tool for maneuvering hypersonic air vehicles capable of use in early design vehicle design stages. This capability will assist hypersonic aircraft OEM to optimize vehicles for mission profiles and improved operational impact. The solver will be based on the Hypersonic Panel Methods formulation, which is shown to be 1000x faster than equivalent RANS CFD simulations. The proposed solver is expected to be computationally efficient and mostly shared-memory parallelized, with solver runtime measured in minutes, without the use of large memory workstations and processors. This will allow the solver to be incorporated into existing MDAO pipelines in use at the Air Force and industry, with minimal hardware footprint. The solver will work with unstructured surface grids derived from CAD inputs, allowing higher-fidelity geometry input during preliminary design phases. The solver will be able to generate aerodynamic forces, moments and pressure contours on full vehicles in conceptual and preliminary design phases. Research in Flight and the Utah State University AeroLab have been developing aerodynamic flow solvers for many years. The new capability will be incorporated into the existing commercial FlightStream subsonic surface vorticity flow solver developed by Research in Flight and will benefit from the extensive integrated preprocessing, visualization and data processing tools available in FlightStream. FlightStream is a highly successful, commercially deployed, software in wide use in the U.S. Aerospace Industry and has been successfully funded from past SBIR/STTR programs. In Phase I, the team will perform a feasibility analysis using the available state-of-the-art and identify and mitigate risks; identify key USAF customers that would benefit from this capability; identify upstream and downstream integration issues; and develop a roadmap to a commercially-viable prototype development in Phase II. In Phase II, the prototype solver will be developed, tested and validated against higher-fidelity Navier-Stokes CFD solvers and available experimental data. The capability is dual-use and will be made available to all high-speed aircraft design teams both in the USAF as well as the U.S. Aerospace Industry.