Event Tag: HyTASP Technical Committee

Fall 2025 AIAA Hypersonics Webinar (AIAA Member Exclusive)

On-Demand Replay

Featuring Francesco Panerai

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Join us for the Fall 2025 AIAA Hypersonics Webinar, presented by the HyTASP TC with featured speaker Francesco Panerai. This webinar will provide insights into carbon ablation mechanisms as Panerai discusses two recent experiments—high-speed X-ray imaging and plasma wind tunnel testing—that reveal how microstructure, oxygen interactions, and surface chemistry influence material erosion, mass loss, and failure mechanisms. Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of the complex processes governing high-temperature ablation in carbon-based materials.

Speaker

Francesco Panerai is an Assistant Professor in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research covers advanced materials for extreme environments, transport in porous media, and hypersonic aerothermodynamics. Prior to Illinois, he was a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center. He received his PhD and Research Master in Aeronautics and Aerospace from von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics (Belgium) and a M.Sc. and a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Perugia (Italy). He is a recipient of the 2019 Air Force Young Investigator Award and is an AIAA Associate Fellow. He is one of the founding members of the Center for Hypersonics and Entry Systems Studies (CHESS) at Illinois.

Building Your Wealth Webinar Series (AIAA Member Exclusive)

On-Demand Recordings Available

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Empower Your Financial Future with Knowledge & Strategy

Financial success doesn’t happen by chance—it’s built through informed decisions, strategic planning, and the right tools. The Building Your Wealth Series is designed to equip you with the knowledge and confidence to take control of your financial future, no matter where you are in your wealth-building journey.

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This series covers key financial topics, from mastering money management and maximizing retirement savings to tax-efficient investing and estate planning. Each session is designed to provide actionable insights, helping you navigate complex financial decisions with clarity and confidence.

Weekly, 6 May–17 June (7 weeks, 7 sessions, 2 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesdays)

Whether you’re optimizing your 401(k), leveraging a Health Savings Account (HSA), or planning for your legacy, this series will give you the roadmap to build, protect, and grow your wealth for a lifetime.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND
This series is recommended for AIAA members who are early career professionals, 35 years or younger.

AIAA HyTASP Spring 2025 Webinar (AIAA Member Exclusive)

On Demand Recording Available

Featuring Special Guest Lecturer, Sarah Popkin, program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office

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This event is offered exclusively to AIAA members. Want to learn more about the benefits of AIAA membership?

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Join us for “AIAA Spring Hypersonics Webinar,” presented by Sarah Popkin, and hosted by the AIAA HyTASP Technical Committee. This webinar sets the stage for understanding DARPA’s role and function in the Department of Defense. To create or prevent strategic surprise, DARPA empowers program managers to develop new, high-risk ideas to advance U.S. technical capability. In space, a new domain called very low Earth orbit (VLEO) is being researched at DARPA across three programs. Those programs and the additional technical and fundamental physics challenges to consider when operating in VLEO will be highlighted

HyTASP Technical Committee Hypersonics Webinar (AIAA Member Exclusive)

Featuring Special Guest Lecturer, Andrew Neely, Associate Dean for Research Engagement, UNSW Canberra.

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The Impact of Fluid-Thermal-Structural Interactions on Hypersonic Vehicle Performance.

Aerothermodynamic heating is an unavoidable consequence of high-speed flight. This presents design challenges for hypersonic vehicles that must be understood and addressed. Even at moderate hypersonic Mach numbers, elevated structural temperatures can distort the airframe of a vehicle, its control surfaces, and propulsion flow paths, degrading performance and reducing life. Multifidelity simulation approaches must be optimized for an appropriate balance between efficiency and accuracy, depending upon their application in the design cycle. Detailed validation cases are required to build confidence in these approaches but these data sets, whether from ground-based or flight experiments continue to be limited. This webinar will explore these challenges and discuss recent experimental approaches developed at UNSW Canberra to build confidence in numerical design tools.

HyTASP Technical Committee Hypersonics Webinar (AIAA Member Exclusive)

Featuring Special Guest Lecturer, Ali Gülhan, German Aerospace Center (DLR e.V.)

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Challenges and of Hypersonic Flight Experiments using Sounding Rockets

In this webinar Ali Gülhan, German Aerospace Center (DLR), will discuss how high-quality validation data that is representative of the real flight environment is necessary for the simulation-based design of flight hardware. Since ground testing facilities have limitations to duplicate the flight environment and numerical tools still have shortcomings in modelling high temperature gas phenomena and gas-surface interaction in such environments, availability of flight data is essential. A complementary validation approach using ground and flight testing for gathering reliable data and validation of numerical tools also is required. Gülhan will explain how simulation of the hot hypersonic flight environment in ground facilities is limited and requires data from further flight experiments. Hypersonic flight experiments by means of multistage sounding rocket configurations are seen as the most cost-efficient options to gather valuable flight data.

HyTASP Webinar Series: Detonation-Based Combustion for High-Speed Propulsion Systems (AIAA Member Exclusive)

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This event is offered exclusively to AIAA members. Want to learn more about the benefits of AIAA membership?

Detonation-Based Combustion for High-Speed Propulsion Systems

Detonation-based engines have recently gained substantial interest as an alternative to traditional deflagration-based propulsion systems, with the theoretical potential to achieve overall engine performance gains in a more compact volume. Specifically, rotating detonation rocket engines (RDRE’s) can exhibit an increase in chamber pressure, temperature and exhaust gas velocity for a substantially lower injection pressure through a near constant-volume combustion process, compared to constant-pressure devices. If these benefits are successfully realized, this can result in overall engine performance gains (i.e., increased thrust and specific impulse) up to ~10% or a 5X reduction in required injection feed pressures.

During RDRE operation, one or more detonation wave(s) travel around the annulus supersonically by continuously consuming the incoming reactants while producing combustion products that exit the open end of the engine. Experimental work performed at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is focused on characterizing engine behavior of a small-scale RDRE for versatile in-space propulsion

Specifically, this work aims to measure engine performance (i.e., thrust and specific impulse), determine the operability range for various flow conditions, and characterize the corresponding operating detonation modes for a 100 N, 25 mm outer diameter detonation-based thruster. Current emphasis is placed on investigating various chamber geometries including both annular and cylindrical configurations, as well as different fuels (i.e., methane, hydrogen); this aims to demonstrate engine behavior sensitives towards the development of engine scaling approaches for determination of the minimum engine size supporting robust detonation. Additionally, to greater understand how to create and sustain high-strength detonations in compact RDREs, fundamental studies into characteristic timescales and coupling mechanisms for detonation-based engine processes including chemical kinetics, injection, flow and acoustic are required. Using various first principle analyses, these timescales are quantified for a variety of fuels, along with different non-idealities being present (e.g., pre-burning). In total, results from these studies advance the understanding of RDREs for future designs that may lead to performance gains above those achievable from traditional designs.