A hypersonic waverider is a type of forebody vehicle geometry for which the oblique shock formed at the nosetip is attached along the entire leading edge and the post-shock flow is supersonic. When used as the forebody for a scramjet vehicle, improved performance is possible as the total mass flow of air passing through the leading shock is captured in the engine inlet. The waverider inlet is point-designed in that its geometry is a strong function of Mach number. Similarly, the scramjet engine is designed to operate most efficiently at a near-constant flight dynamic pressure. Maintaining a constant flight dynamic pressure while increasing altitude requires a corresponding increase in flight Mach number. To circumvent this design restriction in integrating a waverider inlet manifold on a scramjet vehicle, a morphable inner surface at the inlet may be used to maintain the point-design operation of the waverider inlet across a range of flight Mach number. The extent to which a morphable waverider inlet can improve hypersonic scramjet engine performance beyond that of a scramjet with a rigid planar inlet design, and the potential for the morphable waverider to extend the point-design operation of a waverider scramjet. into a design envelope, is investigated using a quasi-one-dimensional analytical model based on first principles. It is shown that a morphable waverider inlet scramjet is capable of significantly higher performance than a traditional rigid planar inlet scramjet across a broad range of flight conditions.
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