A joint study on the starting limits of a generic supersonic inlet

Abstract

The present work is a numerical and experimental study on the starting limits of a simplified generic supersonic inlet with the internal compression, which focuses primarily on the effect of the cowl-lip bluntness at different cowl-contour shapes and internal contraction rates. Apart from the baseline cowl-lip configuration (single ramp) two other geometries with the same flow inclination of 6 degree (double ramp and convex ramp) were investigated. The ranges of the incoming flow Mach number M (upstream of the cowl plate, M = 2.5 ... 3.0) and of the internal contraction ratio (K = 2.0 ... 2.5) were determined to ensure the existence of a complete set of flow stages between the started and unstarted modes. The results confirm a very strong impact of the cowl-lip bluntness on the critical Mach number, which could be quantified for the model configurations studied.