Engineers tackle challenges of hypersonic flight (rdmag - Engineering College Chennai)

 That is, if they can master such flight's known unknowns.

Engineering College Chennai

Hypersonic flight is a particularly intense engineering challenge both in the mechanical forces placed on the structure of the plane and in the physics of the sophisticated engines that must operate in the extremes of the upper atmosphere where the planes would fly.

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Real-world laboratories can only go so far in reproducing such conditions, and test vehicles are rendered extraordinarily vulnerable. Of the U.S. government's three most recent tests, two ended in vehicle failure.

But now, thanks to a five-year, $20 million U.S. Department of Energy grant, an interdepartmental, multiyear research effort is under way at Stanford University to use some of the world's fastest supercomputers to tackle these challenges virtually.

The Stanford Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP) is using computers to model the physical complexities of the hypersonic environment—specifically, how fuel and air flow through a hypersonic aircraft engine, known as a scramjet engine.

PSAAP is a collaboration of the departments of mechanical engineering, aeronautics and astronautics, computer science, and mathematics, plus Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering.

In particular, the program focuses on what is known as the scramjet's 'unstart' problem, said Parviz Moin, the Franklin P. and Caroline M. Johnson Professor in the School of Engineering. He is the founding director of Stanford's Center for Turbulence Research and faculty director of PSAAP.