Overview
In this project you will experimentally explore how high temperatures and shaking loads caused by hypersonic flight affect aerospace structures. These conditions are encountered by high-speed hypersonic glide vehicles and space re-entry vehicles but are very difficult to design for. You will experimentally recreate these conditions and characterise how aerostructures respond to them.
About this opportunity
Aerospace vehicles capable of re-entry from space or hypersonic gliding (i.e. travelling at five or more times the speed of sound in atmosphere), experience challenging thermal and vibrational loading. They can also encounter drastic changes in heat and vibrations depending on the phase of flight. These effects lead to poorly understood structural behaviour, necessitating experimental studies to support the development of hypersonic systems.
Current approaches to testing hypersonic structures typically focus on small material tests for determining properties for design work. There are few facilities globally that can recreate both the temperatures and vibrations encountered by hypersonic vehicles for full components and sub-assemblies. One such facility capable of doing this is situated at the University of Liverpool.
Such facilities are vital for obtaining data regarding how complex structures deform and behave at high temperature, this feeds back understanding to inform the design process of joints and features within structures. The other benefit of these facilities is that they provide a means of obtaining experimental data for validating component and sub-assembly performance as part of the certification process for new hypersonic glide vehicles.
This research project will focus on exploring the behaviour of joints between high-temperature materials. These joints lead to complex buckling behaviour of skin surfaces when heated, which in turn affects how components deform when shaken. The objectives are to:
- Explore the effect of joints on the thermal buckling behaviour of structures when heated to more than 800 °C.
- Determine how structures joined with fasteners deform when shaken at high temperature.
- Develop methods of recreating sudden changes in temperature or vibration that might be encountered during flight
To support your development during your studies, you will be involved in training at the University of Liverpool as well as training activities organised by the UK Hypersonics Doctoral Training Network. Throughout your degree you will also sit in a diverse research group with other PhD students working on projects related to nuclear energy, aerospace engineering and biomechanics. This will help you develop into a skilled research engineer ready to contribute to the development and testing of structures for the most challenging of environments.