Design of a Flush Air Data Sensing System for the Hypersonic Flight Experiment HEXAFLY-INT

Abstract

The HEXAFLY-INT flight vehicle is a small-scale flight demonstrator of a supersonic passenger aircraft [8,9]. In order to determine the flight angles, Mach number and altitude for this vehicle a set of pressure sensors can be used to derive this data. In the frame of this study such a system, usually called Flush Air Data Sensing system (FADS), was designed and adapted to the constrains imposed by the vehicle shape of HEXAFLY-INT. Different theoretical, analytic and numerical approaches from local inclination method to numerical simulations were used to optimize sensor positions for the flight path of HEXAFLY-INT. Afterwards these different approaches was assessed and benchmarked against each other. In the second part of this work different algorithms are investigated to determine the flight properties for simulated inputs and were analyzed in terms of accuracy and real-time performance.