November 22, 2019 – The military’s Missile Defense Agency awarded a contract to Skyhaven to develop a new cooling system for cooling the leading edges of hypersonic vehicles. To accelerate hypersonic vehicles through the atmosphere at high Mach numbers in the 7-9 range, sharp leading edges are used to minimize drag. These leading edges including the nose region, tail edges, and scramjet inlets are exposed to intense, highly localized stagnation point heating and a severe thermal environment. Leading edge cooling of hypersonic vehicles requires new materials and designs to meet demanding heat fluxes that can exceed 1000 W/cm2 at temperatures over 1900 °C. In particular for small radius leading edges at the 3 mm level with a wedge half angle of 6°, new thermal management approaches need to be better integrated with the leading edge acquiring and dissipating the heat. A technical ceramic thermal cooling system is being developed at Skyhaven Systems that uses the latent heat of a two-phase fluid to acquire these high thermal loads dissipating this heat away from the leading edge.