Design and analysis of the air-breathing aircraft with the full-body wave-ride performance

Abstract Waverider is expected to break the lift-to-drag ratio constraint in the hypersonic flight condition and it is commonly been studied as the forebody of the cruise vehicle. In this paper, we developed an approach to make waverider as the airframe for the air-breathing cruise vehicle. The fuselage that designed based on the cone-derived waverider theory with a unique upper boundary curve generates the same conical shock wave as that generated by the conical nose of the vehicle. Therefore, the vehicle is expected to have a full-body wave-ride performance and suitable for cruising in the hypersonic condition. Also, a gap between the conical nose and the fuselage is designed to be the inlet of the air-breathing engine. In comparison with the traditional cone-derived waverider, this kind of configuration has additional volume so that it can afford enough space for installing the engine system in the airframe. The performance of this kind of configuration is validated by the numerical method in the design Mach number. With the engineering estimation approach used to calculate the aerodynamic performance of the vehicle in hypersonic conditions, we studied the influence of design parameters on the aerodynamic performance. Results show that the increase of the design Mach number does negative impact on the lift-to-drag ratio but positive impact on the volumetric efficiency while the increase of the design direction angle has an opposite influence. However, in comparison with the response of the lift-to-drag ratio, the volumetric efficiency is less affected by the dihedral angle, which means that the dihedral angle can control the aerodynamic performance effectively within a limited volumetric efficiency range.