BLACKSBURG, Va. – A professor at Virginia Tech was recently awarded a grant of $450,000 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to study cutting-edge technology.
Hypersonic vehicles travel five times the speed of sound, and at that speed temperatures can exceed 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But very few vehicles can fly that fast, making hypersonics a relatively unexplored field.
“There’s actually been a push recently to get more research in hypersonic,” said Liselle Joseph, a Virginia Tech assistant professor of aerospace. “Because there has been a lapse in the amount of research being done in the last few decades compared to the low-speed regime.”
The grant allows Joseph to pursue experimental research for the next three years. As the only research of its kind being done outside of the U.S. Air Force, Joseph is in the right place to tackle these complicated issues.
“We need a multidisciplinary team looking at this multi-physics problem,” Joseph said. “And here at Virginia Tech I have access to collaborators who study materials, who study ablation, who study high-temperature structures in addition to my aerodynamics. So Virginia Tech is the ideal place to do that.”
If successful, the data collected in Virginia Tech’s hypersonic wind tunnel could set the stage for major developments in the field.
“So many times we see these Hollywood movies and we’re like, ‘Oh, that will never happen,’” Joseph said. “It could happen. It starts with these types of fundamental studies. And then we can harness that to actually come out with a new design. So that’s what we are going after: the next generation of vehicle design, so we are able to go faster, further and be more maneuverable.”