In-flight Mapping of Heating on a Hypersonic Vehicle
(Neely, Choudhury)
In collaboration with DSTO the HIFiRE-0 hypersonic test flight vehicle was instrumented with patches of permanent-change thermal paint and was launched from the Woomera test range in May 2009. This was the first in-flight test of the use of permanent-change thermal paints by UNSW@ADFA to map the extreme aerodynamic heating on hypersonic vehicles. The vehicle was recovered from the Woomera desert in August 2010 and the flight of the vehicle and the subsequent response of the paints was modelled using numerically based simulations of the fluid-thermal-structural interactions. This work was performed as part of a collaboration with A/Prof Riesen from PEMS, UNSW@ADFA and Dr. Paull and Dr. Odam from DSTO.
