Research capabilities

UQ Centre of Hypersonics research program is based around the facilities and equipment developed in-house at UQ in the late 1980s by a space engineering and hypersonics pioneer and Australia’s first professor of space engineering, Professor Ray Stalker, along with Professor Morgan and colleagues.

It has since become widely recognised as one of the leading university-based research groups in the field of Hypersonics and has active collaborations with international universities and research groups including those in France, Germany, Belgium, United Kingdom, United States, Japan, India and China.

Explore our key research capabilities, facilities and associated research groups, and find associated researchers.

Ground testing facilities

Co-design of vehicles and trajectories

The co-design of vehicles and trajectories capability includes modeling of the flight of high-speed vehicles, atmospheric and exo-atmospheric flight, and access to space.

It also includes cruise, acceleration and reentry, and the study of the integration of individual functional components into practical engineering vehicles.

Research areas:

Flightpath analysis
Vehicle configurations

Aerothermodynamics

The Centre for Hypersonics has research capabilities across aerothermaldynamics, including:

Departures from equilibrium incurred in hypersonic flight and in generating hypervelocity flows in the laboratory.
Thermal and chemical non equilibrium, ionised flows.
Reacting flows, wake and separated flows.
Measurement of heat transfer in turbulent and transitional flows.
Laminar and turbulent heating, radiative heat transfer.
Ablative cooling, electron transpiration cooling.
Control and prediction of heat transfer.
Blunt body flows, cone flows, ducted flows and heated walls, friction reduction.

Research areas:

Non-equilibrium flows
Turbulence and transition
Heat transfer
Ablation
Radiation
Electron transpiration cooling

Flight testing

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)

Thermal protection systems

Diagnostics

Control and flow field-structure interactions in hypersonic flight vehicles

The Centre's research capabilities across control and flow field-structure interactions in hypersonic flight vehicles include:

Control of hypersonic vehicles, Investigation of the transient effects of changes of body shape in hypersonic flows.
Primarily movement of control surfaces, and stage separation.
Active and passive controls, atmospheric and exo-atmospheric flight.

Research capabilities

Ground testing facilities

Research areas:

Co-design of vehicles and trajectories

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Aerothermodynamics

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Flight testing

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Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)

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Thermal protection systems

Diagnostics

Research areas:

Control and flow field-structure interactions in hypersonic flight vehicles

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Electric propulsion

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Rocket propulsion

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Supersonic combustion

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Magnetohydrodynamic Braking (MHD)

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