GALCIT Colloquium

The boundary-Layer Transition (BOLT) flight experiment is a sounding-rocket flight test, sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), designed to measure the onset of boundary-layer transition in hypersonic flight. To be launched from Esrange, Sweden in 2020, the BOLT flight payload was designed and built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in close coordination with teams across academia, industry, and government. One of the goals of the flight is to test the current state-of-the-art in predicting boundary-layer transition on a geometry with highly swept leading edges and low-curvature, concave surfaces, in contrast to previous flight tests which have focused on straight and elliptical cones. The design of the flight payload has included ground testing at multiple wind-tunnel facilities and pushed the limits of current Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations and boundary-layer stability analyses. This talk will give an overview of the BOLT research activities, including selected highlights of the numerical analyses, ground tests, and design and fabrication of the flight hardware.