Foreword

The Hypersonic Plasmas Laboratory (HPL) upholds the Portuguese heritage of bringing new worlds to the world, through the exploration of the uncharted waters of Outer Space. Space is our Passion, and might we even say, our Obsession!

We host the European Shock-Tube for High Enthalpy Research (ESTHER), a key European research facility for the planning of planetary exploration missions, which ensures European independence in the access to Space. The facility design and manufacturing has been supported by several Technology and Research Projects funded by the European Space Agency, starting in 2010. On the 19th November 2025, the facility produced a shockwave of about 8 km/s velocity, marking the first time a hypervelocity speed was reached in Portugal.

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We study the physical-chemical properties of hypervelocity flows, leveraging our ESTHER facility at the experimental level, and our diverse numerical resources (CFD, state-to-state, and radiation codes) at the numerical level. However, hypersonics is not our only horizon. If it is about Space, we want to be part of it!

This offciial website provides a description of our flagship facility, but also functions as a repository of our diverse array of works, numerical models, and databases which are meade available as a service to the general scientific community.

The Hypersonic Plasmas Laboratory is part of the N-PRiME group of the Institute of Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion (IPFN), one of the largest Portuguese research units in Physics. with over 100 Ph.D. staff. IPFN is a research unit of Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), the largest school of Architecture, Engineering, Science and Technology in Portugal, involving a community of over 10,000 people.

The Main Course

  • The ESTHER Shock Tube: The European Shock Tube for Enthalpy Research (ESTHER) is the crown jewel of the Hypersonic Plasmas Laboratory. This combustion-driven, laser-ignited, two-stage shock tube has been developed by an international consortium led by IPFN, in the scope of a Technology Research Programme funded by the European Space Agency. The facility is fully remotely handled and is capable of reproducing orbital and superorbital (re)entry flows in most planets of the Solar system. It is a key enabling facility for European planetary exploration missions.

  • The SPARK Line-by-Line code: The SPARK Line-by-Line code has been developed for the simulation of high-temperature, low-pressure gas and plasma radiation, with an emphasis on radiation from entry plasmas, ground plasma facilities, and Hall effect thrusters. The code has been developped in MATLAB and FORTRAN languages, and is freely distributed under a GNU General Public License.

  • The GASPAR database: The Gas and Plasma Radiation Database (GasPAR) is a database containing all the relevant data defining the spectroscopic and radiative data for the overall atomic and diatomic species of atmospheric interest. Compilations of numerical data published by different authors is available in downloadable forms.

  • The STELLAR database: The STELLAR database provides detailed multiquantum datasets of vibrationally-specific rates for the simulation of heavy-impact processes in shocked flows for different compositions: Air (N2, O2, and NO), and CO2. The database tens of thousands rates for V-T, V-D, V-E, recombination, and Zeldovich reactions.

  • Thesis & papers: Downloadable versions of key peer-reviewed articles, Ph.D. and M.Sc. thesis prepared in the Hypersonic Plasmas Laboratory.

Side Dishes

  • Self-published books and other materials: Theory and exercise books and other slideshows created by myself and used in support of my academic duties or the training of undergraduate and postgraduate students. The main covered topics are Thermodynamics and Aerothermodynamics.

About the site

A chance observer might find this site to be on the barebones side, and even sporting unappealing aesthetics. And he would be right, this is a feature, not a bug. After designing a bunch of websites with plenty of eyecandy, using fancy stuff like wordpress and drupal, the maintainer just got fed-up with all the associated bullshit (and getting random dickheads hacking this website, hijacking it for bitcoin mining and other bs). This website is here to relay information, such as thesis, papers, and numerical codes. We want the site to be as lightweight and simple as possible, so that among other things its ecological footprint remains as low as possible.

As such, we are zealous followers of the Motherfucking website design philosophy. To further our argument, consider having a look at the CO2 footprint of this website, and compare it to the footprint of other popular websites. By having a website coded with simple php, without any of the popular apps that pervade the web, we may reclaim a modicum of sanity and common sense in terms of the resources needed to host and share scientific data in benefit of others (not to mention that the site is more difficult to hack).

In short, this website goes to great lengths in trying to respect its users and their electronic resources, by means of being as lightweight as possible. It shouldn't be necessary to allocate as much resources for browsing a webpage as those necessary to run a CFD simulation, owing to massive JavaScript bundles, and constant background tracking processes.

Heavy and slow webpages are a true blight in today's Internet. We will not be complicit with this.

Bonus reading: The Website Obesity Crisis