Sara DI BENEDET TO, Marco MARINI, Pietro RONCIONI, Antonio VITALE, Paolo VERNILLO, G. DI LORENZO, Roberto SCIGLIANO, Salvatore CARDONE, Marta ALBANO, Roberto BERTACIN
DOI Number: 10.60853/h817-h739
Conference number: HiSST-2024-00213
The research and experimentation for hypersonic flight, aimed at creating and testing the enabling technologies for future high-speed systems, is one of the main research topics Europe has been engaging for over 20 years, mainly with the projects dedicated to hypersonic flight for passenger transport (HEXAFLY, HEXAFLY-INT, LAPCAT I&II, ATLLAS I&II , FAST20XX, STRATOFLY). In this frame the Italian Aerospace Research Centre (CIRA), by means of the national program PRORA, and the Italian Aerospace Agency (ASI) funded a project aimed at designing a propelled hypersonic demonstrator, the Scramjet Hypersonic Experimental Vehicle, and its flight experimental mission. The paper presents the baseline air-launched mission scenario that foresees the use of a carrier aircraft and a launch vehicle propelled by a booster to drive the scramjet demonstrator at the defined experimental window, and the first results and evaluations on the demonstrator configuration. A first assumption on the scale of the demonstrator has been done, and its materials layout, its avionics, airframe and the components of propulsive subsystems, including the on-board fuel tanks (hydrogen) for the scramjet engine properly sized. Massive CFD simulations along the flight trajectory have allowed the verification of the aero-propulsive balance and the definition of aerothermal loads and aerodynamic coefficients which have been used for the thermal analysis and the flight mechanics analysis and trajectory calculation, respectively.