Vehicle Integrated Inward Turning Air Breathing Engines

The overall objective of this proposal is to develop a tool that integrates and optimizes the design of internal scramjet engine flowlines with external aerodynamic designs of hypersonic vehicles. The design of non-optimal, manual iteration engine-integrated inward turning scramjets with waverider vehicle shapes has already proven to be a powerful design technique. Phase I of this SBIR initiated a program to develop new and integrate existing flow surface design tools so that a systems level optimization can be performed on an engine and vehicle simultaneously with the utilization of a commercial optimizer. This tool is capable of designing integrated scramjet vehicles, creating the flow surfaces at cruise. Phase II will extend the design and analysis of the integrated scramjet-vehicles off-design. Analysis methods will be developed to analyze the flow surfaces over all points of a mission, including transonic performance and acceleration to cruise. This will allow the optimization of an integrated engine-vehicle and trajectory over predetermined mission requirements. Computational and experimental validation of an engine-integrated vehicle design is planned. Tests will verify the design process and predictive capability of the design tool as well as confirm the high performance capability of integrated inward-turning scramjets and waverider vehicles.