With speeds seven times the speed of sound, temperatures hotter than the sun and chemical reactions that rip apart air molecules, hypersonic flight sounds terrifying.
But a professor and some students at the University of Texas at San Antonio are making the forces of ultra-high speed flight less intimidating with a new hypersonic wind tunnel.
The wind tunnel, known as a Ludwieg tube, is the latest addition to the school’s growing aerospace engineering program. While Southwest Research Institute has a different type of hypersonics lab, UTSA’s Ludwieg tube is the first of its kind in the San Antonio area. It’s also one of only a handful of U.S. university lab wind tunnels that can reach Mach 7, or seven times the speed of sound.
Hypersonics — the study of the effects of speeds exceeding 4,000 mph — is an in-demand field.
Scientists have studied hypersonics for decades, but there’s renewed interest as a new space race beckons, aerospace companies eye the potential for high-speed travel and the Defense Department works to counter hypersonic missile threats from Russia and China.
Dr. Chris Combs talks Monday, May 10, 2021 about the hypersonic wind tunnel he has built in his lab at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
William Luther, Staff / William Luther
Dr. Chris Combs talks Monday, May 10, 2021 about the hypersonic wind tunnel he has built in his lab at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
William Luther, Staff / William Luther
Dr. Chris Combs talks Monday, May 10, 2021 about the hypersonic wind tunnel he has built in his lab at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
William Luther, Staff / William LutherIn August, the Air Force gave Atlanta-based Hermeus Corp. a contract to look at the feasibility of developing a hypersonic Air Force One. At such speeds, the U.S. president — or any payload — could travel anywhere in the world in less than an hour.
The technology isn’t there yet, but it’s getting closer.
“It’s a flight environment that is remarkably complex to deal with and understand,” said Chris Combs, who leads UTSA’s aerospace engineering program. “And we try and narrow down the classic physics that we have to deal with in a manageable way. We focus on the aerodynamics and fluid physics, but there is a lot happening.”
Beyond the physics, Combs said chemistry, heat transfer, fluid flow and material science all play a role, and “they’re all interconnected.”
The university’s new $1.5 million custom-built device stretches across a windowless room on the first floor of the engineering building on the main campus. It’s a 50-foot-long stainless-steel pipe that blasts high-pressure air through a machined nozzle into an 8-inch-square test section and then a large vacuum tank.
An aluminum diaphragm separates the high- and low-pressure sides, and when the airflow bursts at a predetermined pressure, it replicates environmental conditions at Mach 7.2 for up to 100 milliseconds.
That’s only one-tenth of a second, but according to Combs, it’s more than enough time for research because “in 100 milliseconds, we can get 100,000 data points.”
“That’s enough for me,” he said.
Using cameras that capture up to 2 million frames per second, sensors and laser measurements, the researchers study impacts of hypersonic flows and shock waves on variously shaped objects. Each run costs roughly $100.
The lab already has some big-name customers, including the Air Force and NASA.
“We’re not, like, budget testing or anything,” he said. “We’re doing quality stuff, but it doesn’t take a million-dollar budget to do a test campaign here.”
And the process is repeatable. Combs said it takes about an hour to set up everything to do a test.
The lab can also replicate other planets’ atmospheres using different gas combinations in the tube. So, for example, it can re-create conditions on Mars.
Dr. Chris Combs talks Monday, May 10, 2021 about the hypersonic wind tunnel he has built in his lab at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
William Luther, Staff / William Luther“Anything that comes in a gas bottle, we can put in there,” he said. “We can run different planets if we want to.”
Besides contributing to science, the lab is developing a new generation of engineers.
Eugene Hoffman, 27, a third-year doctoral student from Accra, Ghana, came to UTSA in 2018, the same year Combs joined the faculty.
Hoffman is Combs’ lead research assistant and helped in all aspects of the project.
“I think it found me more than me finding it,” Hoffman said. “Then I started the research, and the more I looked into it, the more interesting it became.”
He hopes to work in commercial aviation or space exploration when he completes his research.
“Eugene came into an unenviable situation of showing up to an empty lab and pretty much having to help build this facility from the ground up,” Combs said.
As it did with just about everything else, the pandemic slowed progress on the lab. Combs said supply delays and COVID-19 precautions that limited the number of people and time allowed in the lab delayed the project’s completion by a year.
But he’s thrilled the lab is operational and the university’s aerospace engineering program is growing.
“We publish papers, and we build on the scientific knowledge base, but probably our biggest output is the workforce,” Combs said. “We’re a university after all, and we are training and providing a skilled workforce relevant to hypersonics, which the U.S. needs.
“More valuable than probably any individual research paper are the students that we put out.”
Brandon Lingle writes for the Express-News through Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. ReportforAmerica.org. brandon.lingle@express-news.net
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UTSA goes hypersonic to study next generation of flight - San Antonio Express-News
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