Leni Schmidt and Jan Martinez Schramm
DOI Number XXX-YYY-ZZZ
Conference Number HiSST-2022-451
The progressing climate change and its consequences commonly raises the need to reduce the
environmental impact of civil aviation. A possibility for hypersonic passenger flights is the use of
scramjets that are powered by hydrogen combustion. Consequently, an improvement in performance
of spacecraft regarding their efficiency and flight time is an economic and social desire. While hydrogen
combustion has almost zero carbon dioxide output, water vapor and NO are formed in the process.
Both are believed to have a strong influence on the atmospheric chemistry [1]. Therefore, a precise
experimental determination of both NO and H2O production during the hydrogen combustion is
necessary for the evaluation of environmental effects caused by hydrogen fueled vehicles. To test these
models in the future in the High Enthalpy Shock Tunnel Göttingen (HEG), being one of the major
European hypersonic test facilities, a novel experimental approach to study the development of gas
concentrations at rapid acquisition rates is the absorption spectroscopy with quantum cascade lasers
(QCLs) in the infrared regime [2].