Design of top mounted supersonic inlets for a cylindrical fuselage

Designing an inlet based on the fuselage geometry and its constraints is an important part of flight vehicle design. Among the different possible configurations, design integration of a supersonic inlet with a cylindrical fuselage is a major challenge. On one hand, propulsive efficiency requirements force the designers to consider the simplest compression surfaces for the inlet entrance geometries and on the other hand, the considerable drag of inlet/diverter integrations needs to be minimized, which can affect the inlet. In this paper, two new concepts as a replacement for a top mounted pitot inlet are presented: a three-dimensional wave-derived inlet and a trigonometric bump inlet. They are designed based on computational fluid dynamics simulations and their performance has been measured and compared with the initial single normal shock inlet as a baseline