Jack Williamson - CoC Seminar and Panel Session

Abstract: Air-breathing access-to-space systems have the potential to increase mission flexibility and reduce the launch cost of small satellites over traditional launch systems. To further improve the performance of air-breathing access-to-space systems, some oxygen can be carried on-board to augment the atmospheric oxygen in the scramjet at high altitudes and velocities. This concept is called oxygen enrichment. To date, no sufficient systems-level analysis of oxygen enrichment has been performed to understand the performance improvement or overall design impact of oxygen enrichment. This research project aims to understand the systems level performance and design impact of adding oxygen enrichment and associated auxiliary systems, on air-breathing hypersonic access-to-space systems. To achieve this aim, a type of multidisciplinary optimisation, called co-design, will be used. The aim has been separated into three research objectives: 1. Investigate the performance and design differences of air-breathing hypersonic vehicles with a co-designed engine, compared to traditional design approaches. 2. Identify the changes in optimal trajectory and quantify the performance improvement from adding oxygen enrichment and associated auxiliary systems to an air-breathing access-to-space system that was optimised for no oxygen enrichment. 3. Quantify the performance improvement, and identify design and trajectory differences in an oxygen enriched, air-breathing access-to-space system optimised using a co-design framework. The research contributions will be to determine whether there is a systems-level benefit and demonstrate the design impacts of adding oxygen enrichment and associated auxiliary systems to an air-breathing access-to-space system. This will inform the hypersonic research community whether further development into oxygen enrichment should be pursued and provide a development direction of future work.

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