Evaluation of the Pressure-Corrected Osculating Axisymmetric Flows Method for Designing Hypersonic Wavecatcher Intakes with Shape Transition

The current work evaluates the effectiveness of the pressure-corrected osculating axisymmetric flows method in the design of hypersonic wavecatcher intakes with shape transition. The original osculating axisymmetric flows method, which is essentially used in waverider design, has drawbacks in accurately demonstrating the three-dimensional flowfield due to ignoring the cross-flow effects between the osculating planes. This negatively impacts the intake performance due to the presence of lateral pressure gradients. The pressure-corrected method takes into account these effects by incorporating lateral pressure gradient corrections into the original design methodology using cross-flow velocity information. This results in the generation of three-dimensional streamlines rather than the two-dimensional streamlines of the original method. The semirectangular-to-ellipse wavecatcher intake is selected as the subject of investigation, and the design procedure is reviewed. The characteristics of the wavecatcher intakes with a design point of Mach 6.0 are studied. Computational fluid dynamics analysis of pressure-corrected wavecatcher intakes is presented to assess the design technique. It is found that the initial conical shock impinges at the intake's entrance and the streamtube is completely captured. Furthermore, the comparison with the original wavecatcher intake indicates that the pressure-corrected wavecatcher intake demonstrated better performance in terms of total pressure recovery and flow uniformity. The wavecatcher intake with entrance-to-exit shapes transition showed higher performance than those with the same entrance and exit shapes.