Student : Scott Frendreis
Sponsor : NASA
Summary:
A vehicle in hypersonic flight experiences complex interactions among unsteady aerodynamic loads, structural deformations, and heat transfer within the structure. Due to the highly-coupled nature of this problem, computational flight simulations are a vital tool in the development of hypersonic vehicles.
The goal of this project is to develop a framework for hypersonic vehicle flight simulation by integrating various physical models, each of which analyzes a particular aspect of hypersonic flight. Some highlights of this project include:
- Coupling of rigid-body flight dynamics, a fuselage structural dynamics model, and unsteady aerodynamics
- Incorporation of an advanced scramjet computational model (MASIV) into the flight analysis framework
- Current effort is to couple the fuselage aeroelastic/flight dynamics model with an aerothermoelastic model of a hypersonic vehicle control surface
