Extreme Environment Sensors

The operating conditions of a practical scramjet powered vehicle will vary widely over the course of a flight mission. Transients due to a combination of events including ignition, thermal equilibration, acceleration and climb, cruise, decent, and terminal maneuvers must be accommodated by the engine while achieving mission prescribed thrust levels and efficiency. Some of the key challenges facing high-speed vehicle designers, as it relates to several critical aspects of making hypersonic flight a reliable reality, include vehicle flight control/stability/guidance, aerodynamic design, thermal protection design and vehicle health monitoring. Conventional instruments suffer from an inability to survive extreme environments and do not provide reliable, distributed data such as pressure, temperature, heat flux, shear, displacement, flow velocity, Mach, equivalence ratio, core flow properties, etc. Proper instrument types that are robust, reliable, have a low packing factor, and are easy to replace are vital to enabling next-generation air platforms and high-speed weapons.