Air-Breathing Hypersonic Vehicles: Review, Developments & Future Challenges

Abstract

The hypersonic Flight has drawn international attention in the past few decades resulting in worldwide developments in hypersonic technology for civil and military applications and providing cost-effective and reliable hypersonic flight. This paper presents the recent advancement of different models of air-breathing hypersonic vehicles (AHV) during the last six decades to the present date used for the modelling, simulation and flight test. It highlights their challenges, research progress and their future developments. It also pronounces the theoretical and experimental nonlinear flight dynamic models used for the hypersonic technology development over the years and discusses the aspects of flight control design. The future and the ongoing developments of the hypersonic vehicle models by different nations worldwide are also presented. The bifurcation method with the continuation approach is presented here, which outlines the topological behaviour of the nonlinear dynamic model of AHVs and provides a fruitful analysis of the equilibrium states for the entire wide flight regimes of AHV flight. Bifurcation method shows a promising application to the effective analysis of nonlinear phenomena occurring in flight dynamics, global stability and improvements in control design parameters and flight controls.