CFD Analysis of High-Speed Air-Breathing Inlets

Inlets are a major component in all air-breathing jet engines. They function as mechanisms that capture the freestream air and prepare/process it before being ingested by the other components of the engine. Inlet design varies as we travel along the Mach number regime and is especially critical in ramjet and scramjet engine designs. This research effort will explore the design and compare the CFD analysis of the wedge, star-shaped, and axisymmetric forebody-inlet sections for high-speed propulsion systems under the same reference freestream conditions. Both the wedge and star shaped inlets are designed using 2-D ideal oblique shock relations coupled with streamline marching techniques. Data from this method is then used to create solid models in ‘SOLIDWORKS® ’. Initial CFD analysis is then conducted using the flow simulations SolidWorks package. Future work will include the inward-turning (Busemann) inlets. It is hoped that this paper will form the basis of a living document on high-speed inlets, which would periodically be updated to reflect advances in the field.