EVOLUTION AND APPLICATION OF CFD TECHNIQUES FOR SCRAMJET ENGINE ANALYSIS

Capabilities developed over the past several years in the area of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) have provided today's aerospace engineer with an extremely powerful tool for analysis of complex flowfields of interest. This article discusses the evolution of computational fluid dynamics with reference to milestones in scramjet research in the United States, followed by an overview of some applications of available computational capabilities to the design and analysis of scramjet engines being developed at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and at the NASA Langley Research Center. Finally, future directions in the application of CFD to the development of scramjet engines are discussed.