University of Colorado Boulder announces new hypersonics initiative
No single scientist or engineer, no matter how smart, could solve the challenges of controlled, maneuverable flight of an aircraft or returning spacecraft traveling at more than five times the speed of sound. Temperatures on the vehicles can soar past 2,000 degrees Celsius, and conventional control designs won鈥檛 work.
鈥淚t really takes an interdisciplinary approach to think about analyzing and designing a hypersonic vehicle,鈥 said Iain Boyd, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
And so, 抖阴旅行射 Boulder awarded a two-year grant to Boyd and 20 other faculty members to model better designs for such vehicles. The research will be carried out under a hypersonics interdisciplinary research theme, or IRT, one of three such themes announced today, the others being 鈥淎I-augmented learning鈥 and 鈥渞esilient infrastructure.鈥 The new IRTs join several announced in 2018.