2017/03/13 by Kai Cui, Guang-Li Li, Guangli Li +3 · 1 citation
Engineering · #Computational Fluid Dynamics and Aerodynamics #Plasma and Flow Control in Aerodynamics #Fluid Dynamics and Turbulent Flows
paper · doi:10.2514/1.j055395
This paper proposes a family of high-pressure capturing wing configurations that aim to improve the aerodynamic performance of hypersonic vehicles with large volumes. The predominant visual feature of such configurations is a thin wing called a high-pressure capturing wing attached to the top of an upwarp airframe. When flying in the hypersonic regime, high-pressure airflow compressed by the upper surface of the vehicle acts on the high-pressure capturing wing and significantly augments lift on the vehicle with only a small increase in drag, producing a correspondingly high increase in its lift-to-drag ratio. A series of numerical validations were carried out on the basis of both inviscid and viscous computational models in which ideal cones with different cone angles and combined cone–waverider bodies with different volumes were used as airframes. The results clearly demonstrate that a configuration using a high-pressure capturing wing has a significantly higher lift (with a correspondingly high value of lift-to-drag ratio) than one without a high-pressure capturing wing, especially for vehicles with large volumes. This paper contains a preliminary, results-based report of the conditions under which high-pressure capturing wing configurations were tested.