Role of CFD in the Aerodynamic Design and Analysis of the Parametric Inlet

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) played a significant role in the design of the Parametric Inlet – an advanced, external-compression, supersonic inlet. CFD allowed the designers to account for turbulent boundary layers and shock / boundary-layer interactions during the design of the shape of the internal inlet surfaces, define locations of porous bleed regions, optimize porous bleed factors, examine the effect of a vortex generator array, and examine inlet configurations with various cowl and slot geometries. The CFD simulations provided information that allowed the efficient use of costly wind tunnel resources. Preliminary comparisons between CFD and experimental data are encouraging for the validation of CFD methods for supersonic inlet design.