PhD Studentship: HYPER-UQ: Hypersonic Prediction & Risk Evaluation

Join a world-leading, cross-continental research team

The University of Exeter and the University of Queensland are seeking exceptional students to join a world-leading, cross-continental research team tackling major challenges facing the world’s population in global sustainability and wellbeing as part of the QUEX Institute. The joint PhD programme provides a fantastic opportunity for the most talented doctoral students to work closely with world-class research groups and benefit from the combined expertise and facilities offered at the two institutions, with a lead supervisor within each university. This prestigious programme provides full tuition fees, stipend, travel funds and research training support grants to the successful applicants.  The studentship provides funProject Description

Scramjet engines are key enablers for hypersonic flight, promising efficient propulsion at speeds of Mach 5 and beyond. Yet the risk of unstart—where internal shock structures propagate upstream, choking the flow—threatens performance and stability. Prior studies have shown that unstart can be highly sensitive to small variations in pressure ratio and inlet boundary-layer profiles. Despite decades of investigation, many predictive tools lack robust ways to incorporate uncertainties in boundary conditions, turbulence modelling, and manufacturing variability.

Problem Statement
Conventional CFD workflows assume deterministic inputs, often using “best guess” values. These methods miss the probabilistic nature of input parameters, thereby underestimating unstart risks and limiting confidence in scramjet operability margins. Recent efforts integrated dimensionally adaptive sparse-grid techniques with RANS-based CFD, demonstrating that different probability distributions of uncertain parameters can drastically alter the predicted unstart risk. However, the published framework remains at a proof-of-concept stage, and broader application to realistic flight conditions requires further refinement.

ding for up to 42 months (3.5 years).

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