The Osculating Flowfield Method of Waverider Geometry Generation

On the Conceptual Design of Waverider Forebody Geometries

“…The ability to shape the shockwave more freely enables significant improvements in the performance characteristics tradeoff, although it also results in a more complex design problem as the number of design variables increases. A further evolution of the method is the osculating flowfield method 4 , where the shock generating body for each plane is not restricted to a cone, allowing for greater flexibility in the design. As a number of key technologies advanced and the concept of an air-breathing hypersonic aircraft started to look increasingly feasible, later studies focused on more realistic designs, taking viscosity and thermal effects into account [5][6] .…”

Waverider Design Based on Three-Dimensional Leading Edge Shapes

“…Essentially all inverse design methods, from the simplest planar shock based designs initially proposed by Nonweiler [1] , to ones based on arbitrary shock generating bodies or the osculating cones method [2] and its extensions [3], [4] , have followed this approach. The design approach presented here differs in that the three dimensional shape of the leading edge does not have to be designed on a predefined shockwave shape.…”

“…Due to the shape of the shockwave being unknown and not a design-driving parameter, the approach followed in the osculating cones method and its extensions has to be utilized since they allow arbitrary shaping of the shockwave shape based on simple and easy to calculate axisymmetric flowfields. [3], [4] ) geometry generation methods, which does not require designing a shockwave profile.…”

Efficient Parameterization of Waverider Geometries

“…The ability to shape the shockwave more freely enables significant improvements in performance characteristics, although it also results in a more complex design problem as the number of design parameters increases, leading to an exponential increase in the size of the design space. Further evolutions of the method are the osculating axisymmetry [9] and osculating flowfield [10] methods, where the shock generating body for each osculating plane is not restricted to a cone, allowing for greater flexibility in the design. Although the geometries provided by inverse waverider design methods are not capable of dealing with all aspects of hypersonic flight and they cannot function as complete airframes by themselves, they do provide a very efficient way to obtain the baseline shapes upon which more sophisticated designs can be based.…”