Design and cold flow test of a scramjet nozzle with nonuniform inflow

• The scramjet nozzle design program accounting for non-uniform inlet effects is developed.
• Typical design cases with non-uniform inlet and the corresponding uniform inlet were studied.
• Performance comparison between uniform designs and non-uniform designs are performed.

Dramatic differences in lift and pitching moment of a scramjet nozzle are inevitably produced when its inlet is nonuniform. A rotational method of characteristics computer program which takes into account the non-uniform inflow effects has been developed for designing asymmetric scramjet nozzles. Typical design cases with a given non-uniform Mach number profile and the corresponding mass-weighted average uniform Mach number profile were developed. Then, three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics analyses and cold flow experimental measurements were conducted to quantify performance improvement of the nozzle with the non-uniform design. Both the computation and experiment results indicate that the nozzle design with the non-uniform Mach number profile always exhibit better performance than the design with the uniform Mach number profile, particularly for lift and pitching moment. Compared with the nozzle design with uniform inflow, the improvement of axial thrust coefficient in the nozzle design with non-uniform inflow is approximately 1.75% at the design point, with a nozzle pressure ratio of 35. Moreover, the benefits on lift and pitching moment coefficients of the nozzle design with non-uniform inflow are approximately 6.51% and 6.35% at the design point, respectively. These results confirm that considering non-uniform distribution of the entrance flow parameters of a scramjet nozzle is necessary.