Demonstration of Fluidic Throat Skewing for Thrust Vectoring in Structurally Fixed Nozzles

Abstract

The experimental demonstration of a fluidic, multi-axis thrust vectoring (MATV) scheme is presented for a structurally fixed, afterburning nozzle referred to as the conformal fluidic nozzle (CFN). This concept for jet flow control features symmetric injection around the nozzle throat to provide throttling for jet area control, and asymmetric injection to subsonically skew the sonic plane for jet vectoring. The conceptual development of the CFN was presented in a companion paper (Miller et al., 1999). In that study, critical design variables were shown to be the flap length and expansion area ratio of the nozzle, and the location, angle, and distribution of injected flow. Measures of merit were vectoring capability, gross thrust coefficient, and discharge coefficient. A demonstration of MATV was conducted on a 20%-scale CFN test article across a range of nozzle pressure ratios (NPR), injector flow rates, and flow distributions. Both yaw and pitch vector angles of greater than 8° were obtained at NPR of 5.5. Yaw vector angles greater than 10° were achieved at lower NPR. Values of thrust-coefficient for the CFN generally exceeded published measurements of shock-based, vectoring methods. In terms of vectoring effectiveness (ratio of vector angle to percent injected flow), fluidic throat skewing was found to be comparable to shock-based vectoring methods.