DETROIT – Almost 75 years ago, U.S. Air Force pilot Chuck Yeager became the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound. Engineers have been pushing the boundaries of ultrafast flight ever since, attaining speeds most of us can only imagine.
The same propulsion technology that goes into rockets has made hypersonic speeds possible since the 1950s. But to make hypersonic flight more common and far less expensive than a rocket launch, engineers and scientists are working on advanced jet engine designs. These new concepts represent an enormous opportunity for commercial flight, space exploration and national defense: Hypersonic aircraft could serve as reusable launch vehicles for spacecraft, for example.
Before any aircraft is built and tested, computer simulations help determine what is possible. Researchers have long used computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to predict, among other things, how an aircraft in flight will interact with the forces around it. CFD is a scientific field devoted to numerically expressing the behavior of fluids such as air and water.
An aircraft capable of breaking the sound barrier brings new levels of complexity to an already computationally intense exercise. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are pioneering the use of artificial intelligence to streamline CFD simulations and accelerate the development of barrier-breaking aircraft.
To read more, click on Tech Explore
