Solution-Space Screening of a Hypersonic Endurance Demonstrator

This report documents a parametric sizing study performed to develop a program strategy for research and development and procurement of a feasible next-generation hypersonic air-breathing endurance demonstrator. Overall project focus has been on complementing technical and managerial decision-making during the earliest conceptual design phase towards minimization of operational, technical, and managerial risks

A conceptual design tool to support high-speed vehicle design

This paper aims at presenting an integrated multidisciplinary methodology and the related software tool, called ASTRID-H, developed at Politecnico di Torino to support the conceptual and preliminary design phases of high-speed vehicles. Based on the experience in the development of innovative methodologies to cope with complex and highly integrated aircraft, ASTRID-H has been developed to guide students, researchers and engineers through the very first phases of the design of high-speed vehicles. ASTRID-H supports the users to move from the statistical evaluation of the guess data and the identification of the design space to the geometrical characterization of the vehicle guaranteeing a proper integration of the main subsystems. Already available and widely used mathematical models are here integrated in a new algorithm to face the complexity of the design of high-speed vehicles. In addition, the coefficients of the semi-empirical models that were not focusing on high-speed vehicles have been updated to widen classical theories to cover high-speed vehicles. The resulting implemented methodology allows the users to cope with complex multidisciplinary problems, which encompass a variety of interrelated disciplines and heterogeneous levels of fidelity. Furthermore, this paper reports the some of the main results achieved during the validation of the methodology thanks to the application to the STRATOFLY MR3 vehicle case study. STRATOFLY MR3 is a Mach 8 waverider configuration that stems from more than a decade of European research activities in the field of high-speed and currently under investigation in the Horizon 2020 STRATOFLY Project

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements