Conceptual design and aerodynamic evaluation of hypersonic airplane with double flanking air inlets

Abstract

To aim at design requirements of high lift-to-drag ratio as well as high volumetric efficiency of next generation hypersonic airplanes, a body-wing-blending configuration with double flanking air inlets layout is presented. Moreover, a novel forebody design methodology which by rotating and assembling two waverider-based surfaces is firstly introduced in this paper. Some typical configurations are designed and their aerodynamic performances are evaluated by computational fluid dynamics. The results for forebodies analysis show that large volumetric efficiency, high lift-to-drag ratio, and uniformly distributed flowfield at the inlet cross section can be assured simultaneously. Furthermore, results of numerical simulation of four integrated configurations with various leading edge shapes, including three power-law curves and a cosine curve clearly show the advantage of high lift-to-drag ratio. Besides, the high pressure generated by the side wall of the airframe can be partly captured by the reasonably designed wings in the condition of small flight attack angle. Then the order of lift-to-drag ratio of four configurations at 0 degree flight attack angle is completely different from the condition of 4-degree flight attack angle. This result demonstrates that the curve shape of the leading edge is very important for the lift-to-drag ratio of the aircraft, and it should be further optimized under the cruising attack angle in future work. Air-breathing hypersonic vehicles has been much concerned by United States and other developed countries since the mid-20th century, and a series of research projects has been proposed since 1980s [1][2][3]. The completely integrated design of the airframe and propulsion system is generally adopted for the air-breathing hypersonic vehicles, however, as both the aerodynamic performance for the airframe and the engine intake/exhaust requirements shall be taken into account simultaneously, the design difficulty increased dramatically [1,[4][5][6]. As far as we know, the current aerodynamic design for hypersonic vehicles is mainly for the demonstration vehicles which focused on minimizing resistance and the optimal matching between airframe and engine, and the forebody and engine inlet integrated design is the key issues for the configuration design [7,8].The current air-breathing hypersonic vehicles can be mainly divided into two categories according to the different inlet layouts, i.e. with nose inlet and with ventral inlet. The hypersonic vehicle with nose inlet layout, such as the U.S. HyFly hypersonic demonstration vehicle [9], can efficiently achieve uniformly distributed airflow with high total pressure recovery coefficient for the engine by decreasing the interference of airframe to the maximum extent.. Moreover, the popular internal waverider inlet [7,[10][11][12][13] is also suited to the nose inlet layout [14]. The ventral inlet layout is the most commonly used layout for hypersonic vehicles,

High-Pressure Capturing Wing Configurations

“…Because of this advantage, the concept has received a lot of attention over the years after its inception by Nonweiler in 1959 [7]. In the wake of the arrival of a family of viscous optimized waveriders [8], a lot of literature about their design methodologies [9][10][11][12], performance evaluations [13][14][15][16][17][18][19], and proposed applications [20][21][22][23][24][25] was published.…”

Novel inlet–airframe integration methodology for hypersonic waverider vehicles

“…However, with engine integration, the lift-to-drag ratio of the waverider is expected to be much lower than that of the pure aerodynamic configuration [8]. As a result, over the past 50 years, engine-airframe integration methodologies for the hypersonic waverider vehicle have been extensively studied by many researchers [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. As a first step in the engine-airframe integration presented herein, inlet-airframe issues for waveriders are addressed.…”

“…Rodi [20] employed a waverider constructed using the osculating flow field method as the forebody to realise a high-speed vehicle and proved that the osculating flow field waverider forebodies offer superior performance to osculating cone waverider forebodies. Cui et al [21] proposed a novel forebody design methodology by rotating and assembling two waverider-based surfaces, whereby both the lift-to-drag ratio and the volume efficiency for the integration with the engine inlet improved. Li et al [22] continued You's work [17] and considered the double flowpaths in the dual waverider forebody-inlet integration.…”

Experimental and numerical investigations on dynamic and acoustic responses of a thermal post-buckled plate

“…Temperature variations may change the material properties, the stress state and the configuration of structures, and will influence the static and dynamic performance during working [1,2]. In the meanwhile, structures also work under sorts of loads and excitations along with thermal variations [3][4][5][6]. The service environment is usually highly integrated and complicated.…”