Work that will not
pay for itself
until 2032
About 6 % of turnover goes into research with no committed customer. Some of it will be wasted. The company exists because a previous generation of it was not.
High-enthalpy
flow and the things it ruins
RIPTIDE is our long-running work on air-breathing and rocket-boosted vehicles above Mach 5. We are not building a hypersonic vehicle. We are building the leading edges, the thermal protection and the instrumentation that whoever does build one will need to buy.
The current phase runs a 40 mm-scale leading edge in a shock tunnel at the University of Southampton for total run times measured in milliseconds, then correlates the result against a 90-second arc-jet exposure at DLR. The two rarely agree the first time, which is the interesting part.
| Started | 2019, currently in phase 3 of 4 |
|---|---|
| Peak surface temperature | 2,180 °C measured, 2,400 °C target |
| Materials under test | C/SiC, ZrB₂-SiC, hafnium carbide coatings |
| Instrumentation | Thin-film gauges at 200 kHz, two-colour pyrometry |
| Partners | Southampton, Sheffield, one industrial partner under NDA |
| Funding | Internal, with two Innovate UK grants |
Four more things
we are stuck on
Each has a named lead, an annual budget and a review every March where it has to justify continuing. Two lines have been closed since 2021.
Additive manufacturing of hot structures
Printing combustion chambers in a copper-chromium-zirconium alloy with integral cooling channels, then working out how to inspect what we cannot see. Current effort is on ultrasonic phased-array inspection through as-built surfaces, which is harder than the printing.
Lead: M. Adeyemi · Since 2020
Ceramic matrix composites
C/SiC panels made by melt infiltration, aimed at reusable thermal protection. Twelve panels have been through 40 thermal cycles; three delaminated at the fastener bosses and we still do not fully agree on why.
Lead: Dr H. Vasquez · Since 2019
On-board autonomy
Letting a spacecraft decide which images are worth downlinking. The hard problem is not the model, it is proving to a customer that the thing which decides has not quietly changed its mind since qualification.
Lead: D. Kerr · Since 2022
Design for demise
Making sure our platforms burn up properly on re-entry. Reaction wheels and pressure vessels are the usual survivors, so we are testing titanium tank alternatives and a wheel housing that fails open at 900 °C.
Lead: E. Vaughan · Since 2023
Seventeen doctorates,
and a standing offer
We co-fund PhDs at Bristol, Southampton, Sheffield and Strathclyde. Students spend at least six months on site with a Fisker supervisor and access to the test facilities, and they publish. If your work needs a shock tunnel campaign or 200 hours on a thermal vacuum chamber, write to us.
Half of research is admitting in public that the last two years did not work.
We publish, including
the negative results
Fourteen conference papers and four journal articles in the last two years, most of them with a student as first author.