ADVANCES IN DESIGN AND OPTIMIZATION OF WAVERIDER —— FROM HYPERSONIC TO WIDE-SPEED RANGE

Hypersonic vehicle is one of the key development objects of the worldwide main power of space technology. Nowadays, this type of vehicles is advancing towards the increased speed, augmented maneuverability, and expanded speed range. Waverider is one promising candidate configuration in hypersonic vehicle design due to the excellent advantage of high lift, high lift-to-drag ratio, and uniform flowfield characteristics around the lower surface, which has been a hot area of the hypersonic aerodynamic configuration research for the past decades. This paper first conducts a comprehensive overview of both the historical development and the current trend in typical hypersonic and wide-speed range vehicles at home and abroad. Then the typical design methods, optimization methods, and static/dynamic stability of the traditional waverider are introduced in detail. Overall, the encouraging progress has made the engineering application for the hypersonic waverider quite feasible. Furthermore, the typical design methods of the wide-speed waverider configuration is introduced, mainly including the direct combination of different waveriders, the vortex-shock waverider, and the blending of wing and waverider. In addition, a novel layout design method and project of the waverider-based blended wing-body configuration is presented and the wide-speed range aerodynamic performance is evaluated in detail based on the CFD numerical simulation and wind tunnel experiment. Results show that the subsonic, supersonic, and hypersonic lift-to-drag ratio of this waverider configuration is 8.4 (Ma0.8), 5.8 (Ma1.5), and 5.5 (Ma5.0), respectively, and the variation range of the wide-speed longitudinal aerodynamic center is only 4.8%L, demonstrating the good combination of different high speed and low speed design theory and the superior wide-speed lift-drag and stability-maneuverability matching performance. Finally, the future research and development trend of the waverider configuration is outlined, including the active design and optimization method considering the effects of hypersonic aerodynamic physics, the aerodynamic design and optimization method for hypersonic wide-speed vehicles, and the intelligent variable shape vehicles.