Hypersonic Vehicle Structures | Research Capability & Technology Portfolio

Developing, validating and testing structural designs, components and materials to operate in the extremes of hypersonic flight.

Competitive advantage

Unique in-house expertise in the design and testing of aerostructures to withstand the extreme conditions experienced by a vehicle during hypersonic flight
Expertise extends to both the development of numerical tools as well as the experimental methods to predict and measure the performance of structures, sub-components and materials exposed to hypersonic flight conditions
Measurement and test technologies cover both ground-based measurements and in-flight measurements

Test and prediction technologies enable the increase in TRL of structural designs, sub-components and high temperature materials by exposing them dynamically to the thermal-structural conditions representative of hypersonic flight. This leads to the optimisation of vehicle designs and reduction in the requirement for expensive flight testing

Expertise and technology has been successfully applied to the design and evaluation of aerostructures and subcomponents for the HyCAUSE (DARPA/AFRL/Defence Science and Technology (DST)), SCRAMSPACE (UQ-led consortium) vehicles and the onboard measurement of thermal-structural performance in-flight under the HIFiRE (DST/AFRL) and HEXA