Kyle Hanquist wins 2025 AirForce Young Investigator award

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research honored Kyle Hanquist, assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, with a 2025 Young Investigator Program award. He is studying the effects of hypersonic flight speeds on compliant, or flexible, aircraft structures.

With the three-year, $450,000 grant, Hanquist will determine how high-enthalpy flow – air flow that forces gases to become so hot they create powerful chemical reactions – alters flexible structures. The research is crucial to the development of reusable hypersonic vehicles with flexible structures.

“If you’re flying it multiple times, you have to know how that structure will respond,” he said. “One bad part can take the whole mission down, so you need a clear understanding of how that flow impacts the structure.”

Exploring the unexplored

When a vehicle reaches hypersonic speeds – defined as velocities at or above Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound – it undergoes extremely high temperatures and pressure, which is difficult to simulate in a lab setting. 

“To see how a structure responds, you need to have a long duration of air flow. It can't just be a shock tube where it goes by in a microsecond,” said Hanquist. “There are facilities that can do those high flow speeds, but they can’t generate the high temperatures, so you’re missing a key component.” 

Hanquist combines theoretical and computational techniques to build models that simulate intense heat and air flow speeds.

Rising star status

The Air Force YIP awards are highly competitive and support early-career scientists and engineers who have demonstrated outstanding potential in conducting research aligned with Air Force and Space Force missions.

This is the second YIP award for Hanquist in 2025. In April, the Office of Naval Research granted him a three-year, $750,000 grant to learn more about the use of plasmas in managing heat on aircraft surfaces. 

“Kyle has been one of our most productive and successful junior faculty members, and he is on his way to stardom in his field,” said Farzad Mashayek, professor and head of the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. “Receiving not just one but two YIP awards in the same cycle is rare and truly impressive.”

Hanquist joined the University of Arizona in the fall of 2019 after earning a doctoral degree and completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan.