Local-Turning Osculating Cones Method for Waverider Design
Xiaogang Zheng, Zhancang Hu, Yiqing Li, Chengxiang Zhu, Yancheng You, Wenjia Song
Abstract
To expand the selection of preassigned shock surfaces, a new inverse design method called the local-turning osculating cones method has been proposed for waverider design. The new method discretizes the three-dimensional preassigned shock surface into a multitude of stream surfaces, which are composed of multiple local osculating planes. The flowfield within each stream surface is computed on the same fictional meridian plane based on a new schematic of method of characteristics. In this way, the constraint of obligating the streamline initiating from the discrete leading edge point to flow within the same osculating plane is removed. Two types of shock waves with distinct three-dimensional characteristics are specified as input to demonstrate the validity of the new proposed method. At the same time, two typical waveriders, which are not easily generated by the past waverider design methods, are derived and validated by the inviscid computational fluid dynamics simulation (Euler code). The results indicate that waveriders based on the new method can successfully reproduce the preassigned shock waves and the original flowfields with errors less than 2%. Thus, the local-turning osculating cones method offers a far-improved capability to design waveriders, and it is favorable for hypersonic airframe propulsion integration.