Researchers: Prof. Ann Karagozian, Prof. Owen Smith, Prof. Xiaolin Zhong, Reza Tavassoli (grad), Le Duan (grad) Research Supported By:   NASA Dryden

The Phoenix Air Launched Small Missile (ALSM) flight testbed is proposed to meet requirements for relatively inexpensive, in-flight testing in the Mach 3-6 range. The ALSM could potentially fill a gap in flight test capabilities with respect to altitude and Mach number, as indicated in Figure 1, and would clearly provide useful data under flow conditions that are more realistic than in ground-based wind tunnel facilities.

Figure 1. Flight envelope for various high speed vehicles, including air-breathing vehicles such as the F-15B, X-43A, CIAM, and HyShot (from Bui, et al.).  The regime for the proposed ALSM platform is shown.

There are a variety of potential ALSM payload configurations that could be explored for their mixing and combustion characteristics in the supersonic-hypersonic transition regime.  These payloads are being evaluated in the current project, via simple modeling and numerical simulations.