Simplified Osculating Cone Method for Design of a Waverider

Abstract

Hypersonic vehicles have become one of the key areas for development in the aerospace industry, particularly in reference to long-range precision strike capabilities. A waverider is any supersonic or hypersonic lifting body that is characterized by an attached, or nearly attached, bow shock wave along its leading edge. Previous studies have shown that an osculating cone waverider can be used as the forebody of a hypersonic airframe-engine integrated aircraft. It enables sufficient pre-compression for the inlet system. Usually, an osculating cone waverider is designed using the streamline tracing technique. In this work, a simplified osculating cone method is proposed, termed the geometric relationship method. Two types of osculating cone waveriders are obtained applying the simplified and the conventional approach, respectively. Numerical methods are employed to analyze the differences between both types of waveriders. The obtained results show that the proposed approach in this paper can simplify the design process of the osculating cone waverider with a bit larger drag, lower lift-to-drag ratio, worse homogeneous flow properties at the inlet position, but improved internal volume and volumetric efficiency.