The Effect of Conical Flowfields on the Performance of Waveriders at Mach 6

The performance of 23 kinds of waveriders, derived from different conical flowfields, is analyzed by the numerical computation under the conditions of fight speed of Mach 6, attack angle of 0° and flight altitude of 30 km. These results indicate that the performance is influenced by the shapes and the width to height ratios (W/H ) of generating cones. The geometrical parameter and the lift coefficient are proportional to W/H, while the drag coefficient and the lift to drag ratio (L/D ) have extreme values. Considering the base drag and the computation errors, the waverider with the highest L/D is cut from the elliptical cone’s flowfield (W/H = 1.5―1.618), and the configuration with the lowest drag can also be obtained at W/H = 1:1.5. Accordingly, good suggestions are proposed for practical design based on these computational results.