UT, Knoxville wins $17.8 million grant from the U.S. Air Force to create a wind tunnel
Housed at the UT Space Institute, it will join only a handful of wind tunnels in the world that can mimic the conditions of hypersonic flight.
Researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), will use a $17.8 million grant from the U.S. Air Force to create a wind tunnel that can subject samples of materials like high-temperature ceramics to hypersonic conditions — conditions experienced above Mach 5, which is five times the speed of sound.
The new wind tunnel, which will be housed at the UT Space Institute in Tullahoma, part of UTK’s Tickle College of Engineering, will join only a handful of wind tunnels in the world that can mimic the conditions of hypersonic flight. The work is crucial to the future of hypersonic vehicles such as space shuttles, which slam into Earth’s atmosphere at nearly Mach 25. That tremendous speed heats the shuttle’s surface above 2600 degrees Fahrenheit and subjects it to extreme pressures for up to 15 minutes.
The most vulnerable parts of these vehicles, such as the nose and leading edges of wings, are covered in specialized heat-resistant materials called the thermal protection system.
“The TPS is not continuous. Every joint between tiles, and even the glue that sticks the TPS to the fuselage, is a weakness,” said Jacqueline Johnson, a Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering (MABE) at UTSI. “We have had two glaring examples of what happens when the TPS is weak or damaged in the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters.”
Once completed, the new wind tunnel will also help alleviate the yearslong waiting list for these advanced facilities.
“We have all these different kinds of wind tunnels that each specialize in examining some aspect of hypersonic flight — aerodynamics, gas chemistry, material degradation during flight — but nobody has the capability to replicate full hypersonic flight conditions,” said MABE Assistant Professor Mark Gragston. “There’s a big market for increased testing capability in academic research because that’s where new materials are being developed.”
The project helps establish expertise and capabilities in fabrication, testing, and evaluation of new materials for use in extreme engineering environments and, equally important, helps to establish a workforce trained to tackle this challenge, Gragson said.
The $17.8 million grant, which is being funded by the U.S. Air Force through the Air Force Research Laboratory in Ohio, is being headed by Johnson and MABE Assistant Professor Damiano Baccarella, an expert in hypersonic aerothermodynamics who has previously overseen construction of a hypersonic wind tunnel. They are joined by four other investigators from UT and the University of Dayton Research Institute, creating a team with expertise in hypersonic flow modeling, materials development, experimental flow diagnostics, and wind tunnel testing.
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