Queensland team first to flight test supersonic Scramjet
The University of Queensland will lead an international team conducting the first ever flight tests of the air-breathing supersonic combustion ramjet, intended to substantially lower costs of small space payloads such as communications satellites.
In the 'Hyshot Program', the University's Centre for Hypersonics in the Mechanical Engineering Department will launch two Terrior Orion rockets fitted with scramjet experiments at Woomera, 500km north of Adelaide, in June 2000.
The HyShot program will use the rockets to propel scramjet experiments to a height of 350km above the Earth. On re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, scientists will measure the pressure rise produced in scramjet combustors from burning hydrogen injected at the entrance to the combustor. Tests will be made at speeds of approximately 8600km/hour and at altitudes between 35 and 23kms before the rockets crash to earth.
"The objectives of the HyShot program can be equated to breaking the sound barrier in flight, but for HyShot, it will be the combustion sound barrier that is broken," said Professor John Hay, University of Queensland.
Data will be captured from a radio signal transmitted from the rockets. In addition, a computer package fitted as part of the payload will record the data and be ejected before impact. Ground teams will then recover this backup of the flight data from an impact site 130km from the launch site.
For the past 16 years the University of Queensland has been developing scramjets with funding from Australian, U.S., Japanese and German sources. Development has been possible through the use of the T4 shock tunnel designed by Australia's first professor of space engineering at the University of Queensland, Emeritus Professor Ray Stalker.
"A successful outcome from the HyShot program would mean that the University of Queensland would be the only institution in the world that had undertaken extensive scramjet testing and now had a shock tunnel calibrated against flight for supersonic combustion" said Professor Hay.