Australia and the USA are to extend their co-operation on hypersonics research, agreeing a $54 million partnership to explore technologies for a future generation of air-breathing weapons. The six-year Hypersonic International Flight Research Experiment (HiFire) effort will be led by the US Air Force Research Laboratory and Australia's Defence Science and Technology Organisation, which will co-ordinate research performed with NASA, US industry, the Australian Hypersonics Consortium and the University of Queensland's hypersonics research group.
HiFire, a programme of basic and applied research to understand hypersonic phenomena, will include up to 10 rocket-boosted flight experiments at the Woomera range in South Australia. These will be follow-ons to Australia's successful HyShot scramjet experiments and the US-Australian HyCause flight, now expected early next year.
The USA, meanwhile, plans a hypersonic scramjet test flight in July 2009 from NASA's Wallops facility off the Virginia coast. The Hy-V project is a combined effort by several of the state's academic institutions to test a dual-mode ramjet-scramjet. A scramjet design will be selected within the next six months, with detailed engine design to be completed early in 2008. The scramjet will be boosted by a two-stage Terrier-Improved Orion sounding rocket - a combination used by Australia for four HyShot flights between October 2001 and March this year.
"The project consortium is teaming with government and industrial organisations," says principal investigator Christopher Goyne, director of the university's aerospace research laboratory.
The university's Mach 5 windtunnel will be used to simulate the experiment, and the data validated by the flight. Other partners are Virginia Tech, William & Mary College, Hampton University and Old Dominion University, with funding from the Virginia Space Grant Consortium.
Source: Flight International