Inlet Design and Performance for Supersonic Cruise/Hypersonic Operation Vehicles

Our proposal addresses the enhancement of design capabilities for supersonic inlets using advanced CFD methodology integrated with efficient design-optimization procedures in an automated, GUI driven framework. Three-dimensional CFD solvers, coupled with design optimization techniques, can now reliably refine initial geometries to produce robust, high performance inlet designs accounting for complex viscous/inviscid interactions. This team of CRAFT Tech and the University of Minnesota are leaders in the design and analysis of hypersonic scramjets. Many of the problems associated with supersonic inlets exist at higher speeds and present capabilities of the team provide a significant head start at addressing the problem. In Phase I, we will be focused on benchmarking the CFD codes to analyze an inlet of interest to the Navy, and initiating the development of an optimization tool specialized for varied inlet designs. Features such as automated grid generation, grid refinement and load rebalancing will be part of this GUI drive framework. We will demonstrate the design optimization methodology to improve the performance of one of the inlets analyzed having features typical of current designs.