U.S. Air Force pushes hypersonic structures research with $9M grant

The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory has awarded a $9 million contract to Ohio-based ARCTOS Technology Solutions to develop next-generation aerothermoelastic structures technologies for high-speed airbreathing vehicles, a research program that addresses one of the most demanding unsolved engineering problems in hypersonic flight.

The contract, awarded competitively after two offers were received, runs through June 30, 2031, giving ARCTOS and the Air Force Research Laboratory a five-year runway to advance research into how aircraft structures respond to the combined thermal and aerodynamic loads that hypersonic flight generates.

Work will be performed at ARCTOS’s Beavercreek, Ohio facilities and at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, also in Ohio, where the Air Force Research Laboratory is headquartered. Fiscal 2026 research, development, test, and evaluation funds in the amount of $144,230 are being obligated at the time of award, with the remainder of the $9 million total to follow across the performance period.

Aerothermoelasticity is the discipline that sits at the intersection of aerodynamics, heat transfer, and structural mechanics — three fields that, at subsonic and low supersonic speeds, can be studied largely in isolation because their interactions are manageable. At hypersonic speeds, typically defined as Mach 5 and above, that separation breaks down entirely.

The air in front of a vehicle moving at those velocities heats to temperatures that can exceed 2,000 degrees Celsius, and the structural panels, leading edges, and control surfaces that must survive that environment simultaneously deform under aerodynamic pressure, expand and weaken under thermal loading, and interact with the aerodynamic flow in ways that change the vehicle’s handling characteristics and structural integrity in real time. Predicting how a hypersonic airframe will respond to those combined loads across an entire mission profile — and how long it will last before fatigue or thermal degradation compromises its structural integrity — is the engineering problem that ARCTOS is being paid to help solve.

The contract specifically addresses two capability gaps that the Air Force Research Laboratory has identified in the current state of the science. The first is response and life prediction for high-speed airbreathing vehicles — the ability to model, simulate, and ultimately predict how a hypersonic structure will behave under operational conditions before it is built and flown, reducing the reliance on destructive testing and the costly failures that come with it. The second is enhanced testing capabilities in high-temperature regimes — the ground-based experimental infrastructure that allows researchers to subject material samples and structural components to the thermal and aerodynamic conditions they will face in flight, validating the predictive models against measured data and identifying failure modes before they manifest in a vehicle.

Airbreathing hypersonic vehicles, those that use atmospheric oxygen to combust fuel rather than carrying their own oxidizer, represent a specific and particularly challenging subset of the hypersonic design space. A scramjet-powered cruise missile or strike vehicle must sustain flight through the atmosphere for extended periods, meaning its structures must survive continuous thermal and aerodynamic loading rather than the brief, intense pulse of a ballistic reentry vehicle. The inlet, combustion chamber, and exhaust nozzle of an airbreathing engine operate in an environment of sustained extreme heat while also serving structural functions that affect the vehicle’s aerodynamic performance.

Designing structures that can fulfill all of those roles simultaneously, across a full mission profile, at acceptable weight and cost, is a problem that current engineering tools cannot fully solve — which is precisely why the Air Force Research Laboratory is funding research to advance those tools.