Bluntness impact on performance of waverider

Waverider serves as a good candidate for hypersonic vehicles, especially for high lift-to-drag ratio aircraft. Restricted by aerodynamic heat and manufacture techniques, the sharp leading edge of waverider needs to be blunted. In order to study the blunt leading edge's influences on the waverider, computational fluid dynamics tools are used to study the aerodynamic and aero-thermodynamic property of waverider with different blunt radii. The numerical methods are validated by test case and empirical formula. Numerical simulations show that blunting the leading edge could reduce the maximum heat flux effectively, but it also degrades the aerodynamic performances. When the blunt radius increases, the aerodynamic performance degrades significantly, while the heat flux wears off. With a fixed blunt radius, the aerodynamic performance mainly depends on the angle of attack; while the heat flux is less affected by the angle of attack. When designing waverider, the influence of bluntness on aerodynamic force and heat flux should be considered synthetically and the optimal balance point needs to be determined. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.