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Schedule including this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, March 1, 1999
A milestone in atmospheric vehicle design will be the construction of a craft capable of sustained flight in the so-called hypersonic regime (speeds in excess of 5X the speed of sound). The applications of such a craft could include an airbreathing cruiser flying at Mach 10 that would be able to fly halfway around the globe in under two hours or accelerate a rocket powered upper stage to a fuel-efficient separation point. At Mach 25, a hypersonic airbreathing vehicle would be traveling at near-orbital speeds (as the cancelled NASP program hoped to demonstrate); and at even higher Mach numbers, aerodynamically designed space probes could use planetary atmospheres to accomplish maneuvers. An inverse approach to the hypersonic vehicle design process will be presented in which a desirable flowfield is first selected, and then a vehicle shape is derived which provides that flowfield. One promising inverse-design solution is the hypersonic "waverider", so named because the bow shock is everywhere attached to the leading edge in these configurations. Applications of waveriders to a variety of terrestrial and space missions will be described, including interplanetary trajectories that use lifting forces in planetary atmospheres.
Dr. Mark J. Lewis is an Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Maryland College Park, and Director of a NASA-sponsored Center of Excellence in the field of high speed flight and high speed airbreathing propulsion. Dr. Lewis is the author/co-author of over 140 publications, with primary research areas including hypersonic engine/airframe integration and optimization, unsteady flows in supersonic combustion engines, environmental interactions, mixing in gas turbine for emissions control, and advanced space propulsion. He came to Maryland in 1988 after receiving a Doctor of Science degree in Space Propulsion from MIT. He also has degrees in Aeronautics and Astronautics (BS-1984, MS-1985) and in Earth and Planetary Science (BS-1984), all from MIT, and is an Associate Fellow of the AIAA and a current member of the ASME Propulsion National Technical Committee. Dr. Lewis received the College of Engineering Teaching Award in 1989, the Service Award in 1992, and the Aerospace Department Professor of the Year in 1997. He teaches aircraft and rocket propulsion, spacecraft design and compressible fluid mechanics, and established an undergraduate spacecraft design laboratory. He is the AIAA student chapter advisor, and Director of the aerospace undergraduate program.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Dr. Jan Kalshoven
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