Astrox has over fifteen years of experience in hypersonic vehicle design and analysis.
Astrox Corporation has developed a conceptual design system called HAVDAC © (Hypersonic
Astrox Vehicle Design and Analysis Code) and an object-oriented version of this
design environment called HADO © (Hypersonic Aircraft Design Optimization).
The HAVDAC code and HADO systems have been incorporated into the current suite of
SIDE derived products such as HySIDE, SuperSIDE, and SpaceSIDE. HAVDAC and
HADO employ an inverse design methodology which is capable of generating vehicle
geometries, and analyzing the design point performance of those geometries in very
short run times. Being a design code, as opposed to a CFD code, HAVDAC is able to
exploit the simplicity and speed of approximate analysis techniques while still
maintaining a good degree of accuracy in the performance results. Utilization of
HAVDAC and HADO’s rapid design and analysis capabilities allows for both the systematic
study of the effects of the various design inputs, as well as the application of
a numerical optimization to produce optimized vehicles.
The HAVDAC and HADO systems have the unique capability to design vehicles that may
have 2-D, outward-turning-axisymmetric, or inward-turning-axisymmetric geometries
that have thus far remained unexplored. The vehicles with inward-turning inlets
have the added and important advantage of reducing the actively cooled surface areas
or even eliminating them altogether, thus significantly reducing the vehicle weight.
This also results in higher effective specific impulse and hence less fuel carried
to reach the same range or in increasing the range.
The HADO system is a more comprehensive system than the HAVDAC code because it consolidates
the HAVDAC code with other design modules which:
- estimate on and off design performance of the HAVDAC/HADO
generated configurations
- select the fuel and corresponding propulsion system
for up to three (can be increased if necessary) different portions of the trajectory
- calculate the available volume in the vehicle and compare
that to the total calculated volume required for different fuels (vehicle "closing")
- compute the vehicle empty weight, dry weight, GTOW (GLOW),
fuel fractions, structural fraction and many other parameters.
- calculate overall
performance, efficiencies, range etc. across a complete acceleration and cruise
trajectories.
- The HADO system
is a design tool that integrates many disciplines into one software system for the
design of hypersonic vehicles. HADO has been developed using SIDE © (System Integrated
Design Environment) that was also developed by Astrox. The design environment allows
the designer to construct complex models from simpler components in an existing
component library. The availability of the HADO system is an opportunity to develop
a design tool that can be tailored to the design of advanced re-usable launch vehicles
and can continually be expanded to incorporate new capabilities.
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