A Spectral Method Formulation of Combustion-Induced
Damage over the Surfaces of Hypersonic Vehicles
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dei-hdei-sm-aeroastro-2026-thesis.pdf
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22.62 MB
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b2d5396bc1745f2621f2746d426aff87
Author(s)
Dei, Hillel
Advisor(s)
Harris, Wesley L.
Date Issued
February 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Given the growing usage of hypersonic vehicles and the increasing popularity of bare stainless steels as a primary structural material, it is necessary to understand the behavior of these stainless steels in the hypersonic environment. However, there exists a significant gap in our understanding of the ignition and combustion of stainless steels in hypersonic flows, due to the widespread use of thermal protection systems. It is vital to understand how stainless steels, in the absence of thermal protection systems, behave under these hypersonic conditions, especially with respect to destructive phenomena like ignition and combustion. Thus, the goal of this work is as follows: to take the existing models of metallic combustion in lower-speed, albeit high-pressure, oxygen-rich flows in the provided sources and adapt them to describe hypersonic flows of interest, exploring the combustion-induced degradation of hypersonic vehicles in the range of Mach 4 to Mach 9 primarily, with limited capability for higher Mach numbers. This provides a crucial foundation for further work into analyzing the coupling of high-speed aerothermodynamics with the metallic combustion of structural components. All codes used in this thesis are published on GitHub under https://github.com/HillelDei/SM_Thesis and may be made available upon request.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
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