(Advisor: Prof. Dimitri Mavris]

will defend a master’s thesis entitled,

On

Friday, April 8 at 8:00 a.m.

Collaborative Visualization Environment (COVE)

Weber Space Science and Technology Building (SST II)

Abstract

For decades, the United States has largely been uncontested in its quest to advance its national interests in every domain – to protect the American people, promote prosperity, preserve peace, and advance American influence. To maintain technological superiority, the National Security Strategy calls upon the military to field new capabilities that clearly overmatch US adversaries in lethality. Furthermore, the US military has identified hypersonics as an area of interest to stay competitive on the global stage. Hypersonics have been around for over 70 years ranging from the X-20 to the Space Shuttle; however, these projects were products of the traditional design-build-test methodology which often never saw flight. This design-build-test methodology is unable to meet the demands of technological growth and complexity and often drives up costs and overruns. Thus, there is a need to develop a new methodology for assessing hypersonic weapon capability rapidly to support interactive decision making for conceptual development.

Hypersonic conceptual design distinguishes itself from traditional aircraft design because the disciplines that must be considered are highly coupled and tightly integrated which drastically increases design risk due to sources of uncertainty. Due to this uncertainty, conceptual design is critical because the decisions made have profound ramifications throughout the entire process. To address this uncertainty, physical experiments are required to provide the highest quality of data; however, they are extremely limited in scope and expensive. Hence, there is a need to make cost-effective, informed decisions at the conceptual design level when designing novel hypersonic vehicles. Due to the coupling of disciplines within hypersonic conceptual design, a Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization (MDAO) environment was used to design novel hypersonic vehicles. To aid in evaluating these alternatives, agent-based modelling was used to study the effectiveness of the vehicles through operational analysis (OA). By integrating an MDAO environment with an OA framework, novel hypersonic vehicles were constructed, and their capabilities assessed through a process known as effectiveness-based design (EDB). Within EBD, the design objective is shifted from performance metrics (e.g., weight, range, etc.) to effectiveness metrics (e.g. targets killed, survival, etc.) which allows decision makers to consider and understand the implications of design-space-limiting decisions earlier in the process. This shifts away from over-defining requirements before exploring potential best solutions to the problem.

Thus, the purpose of this thesis presents a new methodology to address the need of designing and rapidly assessing hypersonic capability to better inform the decision maker through the integration of OA within an MDAO environment thereby closing the loop by coupling the effectiveness to vehicle design parameters.

Committee

• Prof. Dimitri Mavris – School of Aerospace Engineering (advisor)
• Dr. Alicia Sudol – School of Aerospace Engineering
• Dr. Kenneth Decker – School of Aerospace Engineering