Actuation and Controls Research Advanced Adaptive Propulsion Concepts

Overview

DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, Mechanical Sciences Division under the Weapons and Materials Research Directorate performs basic and applied research on Turbine Power and Propulsion Sciences including hypersonic vehicle systems to innovate far‑term and mid‑term technologies envisioned for future Multi‑Domain Battlefield Operations. Vehicle Power and Propulsion technologies are key thrust areas for innovations in Army rotorcraft gas turbine engines and hypersonic long‑range precision fire weapon systems to enhance their efficacy of targeted lethality, durability, safety and superior performance with cost‑effective sustainability.

For high power density engines operating under extreme harsh operating conditions, it is important to develop advanced high temperature next‑gen materials, thermal/environmental barrier coatings, and adaptive components for high‑efficiency multi‑domain operational capability. In the area of hypersonics research, efficiency advantages can be realized in real time, such as improving the aerodynamic efficiency, thermal loading, flight range, and manoeuvrability using light‑weight high temperature materials and adaptive structures for better overall performance.

The development of such advanced systems requires tightly coupled fluid‑structure interaction simulation enabled advanced vehicle concepts and better control systems. Actively changing the geometry of the aerodynamic lifting and control surfaces enables re‑configuration of vehicle structure in real‑time to optimised performance, increasing the effective lift‑to‑drag ratio and keeping benign thermal exposure to the hypersonic vehicle structures. Under this research program, focus will be to innovate advanced gas turbine concepts with adaptive components, morphing scramjet inlets, articulating exhaust nozzles and other morphing or articulating structures for control surfaces or leading‑edge nose sections of vehicle systems.

The research will involve intelligent, robust, and adaptive control and actuation methods that will advise scaling and feasibility for implementation in air‑breathing engine flow paths, lifting surfaces, and control surfaces. Prospective researchers will focus on a multidisciplinary systems‑level approach to maximise the speed and accuracy while minimising the complexity of adaptive hypersonic systems using advanced actuators, smart materials, sensor systems, and new adaptive control methods to manage the open‑ended degrees of freedom of morphing systems.

Methods will span both active smart‑material based or conventional control and passive methods taking advantage of the natural forces and temperatures encountered in flight conditions. The research will focus on developing high‑temperature smart‑material based actuation systems with fail‑safe closed‑loop controller. Researchers will conduct full‑scale and scaled‑down experiments in relevant thermal and aerodynamic environments integrating inputs from the research team, providing validation data for analysis as well as correction factors accounting for unmodelled physics.

The MDAO (Multi‑Domain Analysis & Optimization)‑based vehicle design configurations and associated performance predictions will be established to represent the full potential of morphing technology given a fully custom design. The result will provide an experimentally characterised prototype of enabling morphing‑vehicle technologies including materials and actuation systems in relevant, combined high‑temperature and aerodynamic environments. This research will also characterise the parameter trade space and mission effectiveness of a suite of optimised hypersonic morphing actuation concepts using state‑of‑the‑art, experimentally‑informed MDAO processes.

This research position is a critical part of ongoing mission programmes towards developing next‑gen propulsion technologies, including adaptive turbine component‑based propulsion, articulating blades, and morphing hypersonic systems for current and future Army vehicles. Research proposals are invited to conduct basic and applied research on efficient high‑force density actuation systems using smart materials or…