NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS OF INVISCID AIRFLOWS IN RAMJET INLETS

Abstract

The performances of three different ramjet inlets and an entire ramjet are numerically studied in this paper. The fluid is assumed to be inviscid. Inlet 1 is a SCRAMJET inlet and is chosen from the literature. Inlets 2 and 3 are instead designed based on the Oswatitsch principle. Inlets 2 and 3 produce a series of oblique shocks merging at the engine cowl lip followed by a terminating normal shock just downstream of the inlet throat. In ramjet, the combustion is modeled using a non-uniform volumetric heat source distributed in the combustor area. The position of the terminating normal shock in Inlets 2 and 3 is controlled via the inlet’s back pressure. Instead, in ramjet it is bounded by the amount of heat rate added in combustor and the exhaust nozzle throat area. For the numerical simulations, the Roe (1981) and MacCormack (1969) schemes are used. To prevent the spurious numerical oscillations in high resolution computations by Roe scheme the van Albada flux limiter (1982) is used, while in MacCormack scheme artificial viscosity terms are added to damp the oscillations. To double check the accuracy of the computations, the Fluent software package has also been used. Comparisons show very good agreement.