Effects of Angles of Attack and Throttling Conditions on Supersonic Inlet Buzz

Abstract

A series of numerical simulations are carried out to analyze a supersonic inlet buzz, which is an unsteady pressure oscillation phenomenon around a supersonic inlet. A simple but efficient geometry, experimentally adopted by Nagashima, is chosen for the analysis of unsteady flow physics. Among the two sets of simulations considered in this study, the effects of various throttling conditions are firstly examined. It is seen that the major physical characteristic of the inlet buzz can be obtained by inviscid computations only and the computed flow patterns inside and around the inlet are qualitatively consistent with the experimental observations. The dominant frequency of the inlet buzz increases as throttle area decreases, and the computed frequency is approximately 60Hz or 15% lower than the experimental data, but interestingly, this gap is constant for all the test cases and shock structures are similar. Secondly, inviscid calculations are performed to examine the effect regarding angle of attack. It is found that patterns of pressure oscillation histories and distortion due to asymmetric (or three-dimensional) shock structures are substantially affected by angle of attack. The dominant frequency of the inlet buzz, however, does not change noticeably even in regards to a wide range of angle of attacks.