Performance analysis of the hypersonic vehicle with dorsal and ventral intake

Abstract

The integrated design of the airframe and inlet is the favorite choice for the aerodynamic configuration design of the air-breathing hypersonic vehicle. To better understand the integrated configurations with a dorsal intake, this paper utilizes the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method to comprehensively compare the performance of integrated configurations with the dorsal and traditionally used ventral intake. The performance indexes include aerodynamic performance, such as lift-to-drag ratio, the inlet performance, and thrust-to-drag balance performance. First, under the same geometric constraints, two integrated aerodynamic configurations with dorsal and ventral intake are designed based on a truncated Busemann inlet. Second, the CFD numerical simulation method based on multi-GPU parallel computing is developed and verified. Then, the flow-field characteristics, the aerodynamic, inlet, and thrust-to-drag balance performance of the two types of configurations in a wide range of Mach numbers are comprehensively compared using the GPU-based efficient numerical simulation method. The advantages and disadvantages of the two types of configurations are then analyzed to provide a meaningful reference for the aerodynamic configuration design of air-breathing hypersonic vehicles.