Conceptual design and aerodynamic evaluation of hypersonic airplane with double flanking air inlets

To aim at design requirements of high lift-to-drag ratio as well as high volumetric efficiency of next generation hypersonic airplanes, a body-wing-blending configuration with double flanking air inlets layout is presented. Moreover, a novel forebody design methodology which by rotating and assembling two waverider-based surfaces is firstly introduced in this paper. Some typical configurations are designed and their aerodynamic performances are evaluated by computational fluid dynamics. The results for forebodies analysis show that large volumetric efficiency, high lift-to-drag ratio, and uniformly distributed flowfield at the inlet cross section can be assured simultaneously. Furthermore, results of numerical simulation of four integrated configurations with various leading edge shapes, including three power-law curves and a cosine curve clearly show the advantage of high lift-to-drag ratio. Besides, the high pressure generated by the side wall of the airframe can be partly captured by the reasonably designed wings in the condition of small flight attack angle. Then the order of lift-to-drag ratio of four configurations at 0 degree flight attack angle is completely different from the condition of 4-degree flight attack angle. This result demonstrates that the curve shape of the leading edge is very important for the lift-to-drag ratio of the aircraft, and it should be further optimized under the cruising attack angle in future work.