Aircraft

Agency looks at lightweight, heat-resistant materials to replace aluminium in high-speed civil aircraft structures

The European Space Agency has launched a research project to identify heat-resistant materials and active cooling techniques for intakes, skins and leading edges of civil aircraft that would cruise at speeds between Mach 3 and Mach 6.

The 36-month, €8.4 million ($10.5 million) Aerodynamic and Thermal Load Interactions with Lightweight Advanced Materials for High Speed Flight (ATLASS) programme is co-funded by the European Union.

The first task under ATLASS is to examine supersonic transport designs that increase the lift-to-drag ratio through the use of compression lift and waverider principles, taking into account sonic boom reduction.

"Almost no studies have been performed on supersonic transport vehicles above Mach 3. Concorde and other studies in America and Japan limited the flight speed to between Mach 2 and 2.4, allowing the use of normal aluminium alloys," says ESA.

The agency thinks a wide range of heat-resistant and lightweight materials are now available that could replace aluminium alloys.

Experiments to be conducted under ATLASS will examine these materials in realistic aircraft shapes at elevated flight Mach numbers in German aerospace centre DLR's L3K arc-jet test facility. Other ATLASS research will model heat transfer investigate transpiration and electro-aerodynamic cooling techniques and experiment with ceramic-matrix composite combustion chambers that require less chamber liner cooling, for reduced nitrous oxide emissions.

As well as DLR, ESA's partners include EADS Astrium, missile manufacturer MBDA, French aerospace research agency ONERA, the UK's University of Southampton, Germany's University of Stuttgart and France's Université Pierre et Marie Curie.