The numerical simulation techniques research and preliminary experimental validation of the start characteristics for a two-dimensional hypersonic inlet

Abstract

The paper presents the research of the numerical simulation techniques and the preliminary experimental validation on the start characteristics for a typical two-dimensional (2D) hypersonic inlet. In order to obtain the start and unstart hysteresis loop, numerical simulations methods using the incoming flow field, the zero-velocity flow field, and the latest convergent flow field as the initialized flow field separately are adopted to calculate the inlet start characteristics until the flow fields converge. The calculation software is AHL3D, a parallel computational fluid software self-developed by CARDC. The numerical methods also include the method from unstart flow field to start one with Mach-numbers gradually increasing till the inlet is start and the method from start flow field to unstart one with Mach-numbers decreasing till the inlet is unstart. According to the comparison with different initialized flow field and with different step-size of Mach-number, the inlet start characteristics are obtained and the numerical techniques are analyzed. Based on the comparison and the analysis, it is suggested that the numerical techniques of inlet start characteristics should use the zero-initialized flow field with one step to the final Mach-numbers to predict the minimal self-start Mach-number of the inlet and use the incoming flow-initialized flow field to predict the minimum start Mach-number. The results show that the numerical techniques are high-efficient and easily operational. To verify the effect of the numerical techniques, wind tunnel tests are arranged to research the start characteristics of a typical 2D hypersonic inlet. The preliminary experimental result shows that the numerical techniques of predicting inlet start characteristics are consistent with the experiments very well, which means that the application of the numerical techniques can be further carried out for such hypersonic inlets as mentioned in the current paper.