Study on the effect of the canard on wide-speed range aerodynamic performance of the cuspidal waverider

Abstract

As a type of wide-speed range waverider, the vortex lift waverider can make better use of the vortex lift characteristics to enhance the low-speed aerodynamic efficiency of the waverider. In order to study the influence of the canard on the wide-speed-range aerodynamic performance of the vortex lift waverider, this paper takes the cuspidal waverider configuration as the benchmark configuration for research, and uses numerical simulation methods to compare and analyze the wide-speed-range aerodynamic performance of the canard-off and canard-on cuspidal waverider. The obtained results show that at most flight angles of attack, the canard can significantly increase the lift coefficient of the cuspidal waverider at low speeds, while at high speeds, the canard has little effect on the lift coefficient of the cuspidal waverider, but it can still increase its lift coefficient. And the presence of the canard increases the drag coefficient of the cuspidal waverider, but it also leads to an improvement in its lift-to-drag ratio, which helps to improve the aerodynamic performance of the cuspidal waverider over a wide-speed range. In addition, in order to analyze the reasons, this paper presents a comparative analysis of the lift coefficients and pressure coefficients for the canard-off and canard-on cuspidal waverider configurations, and some meaningful results are obtained. These results are further verified by investigating the characteristics of the vortex structure in external flow fields of the several waverider configurations. This paper concludes that the main reason for the influence of the canard on the aerodynamic performance of the cuspidal waverider over the wide-speed range lies in the interaction between the vortex structure generated by the canard and the leading edge vortex on the upper surface of the cuspidal waverider.