An interactive approach to the design and optimization of practical hypersonic waveriders

Over the course of the last decade advances in materials and propulsion technology have renewed interest in a variety of supersonic and hypersonic vehicles. These include the National Aerospace Plane (NASP) and a high-speed civil transport (HSCT) for the trans-oceanic routes. Waveriders, because they exhibit exceptionally high lift-to-drag performance at their design flight conditions, may prove to be excellent candidate designs for such vehicles.; Previous waverider studies have taken a rigorous approach toward their design and optimization using diverse, but generally time-consuming, computational approaches. The research presented here provides an interactive software tool for the design, evaluation, and optimization of waveriders in real-time using inverse methods that are robust and accurate. The result is a workstation interface that facilitates the immediate observation of performance trends associated with manipulation of the various geometric and flow parameters that govern the surface topology of the waverider. In this way, "manual" optimization of candidates for a specific mission may be quickly performed.; The methods used are validated with various advanced numerical algorithms, and significant insight is gained of the limits within which this simplified approach will produce satisfactory results. Results from the application of this software tool to the design of a Mach 4 waverider high-speed civil transport are presented to illustrate the design code's effectiveness. The full-flight-envelope aerodynamic performance of this waverider is also examined to determine whether waveriders are competitive with conventional HSCT concepts.