Ignition and Combustion of Steels in Hypersonic Flows: A Coupled Formulation

Given the growing use of hypersonic vehicles built from bare alloys, it is necessary to predict when these alloys ignite and burn in the absence of thermal protection. Existing metallic-combustion models were developed mainly for lower-speed, high-pressure, oxygen-rich environments and therefore do not directly describe the aerothermal conditions of Mach 4 to 9 flight. Here we apply a coupled oxidation/combustion boundary-layer formulation to hypersonic stagnation-point flow using a quasi-steady similarity solver. An inverse mode prescribes measured wall-temperature histories and infers the net heat input required to sustain them. This provides an internal consistency check against classic steel ignition data and supports future fully predictive coupling of hypersonic aerothermodynamics with metallic combustion.