Highly Compact Supersonic Cruise Missile (SSCM) Engine Inlet

As air vehicle speeds increase, air breathing engine and inlet technology follow through concurrent supersonic performance requirements. The recent ability to build smaller supersonic engines has established a void in small air vehicle inlet capability. A solution to decrease the overall footprint of supersonic inlets within next-generation Supersonic Cruise Missiles (SSCMs) is desired. SSCMs, like the Next Generation TOMAHAWK (NGT), are under consideration in response to Prompt Global Strike (PGS) requirements, which characterize engagement time with Time-Critical-Targets (TCTs). Conventional inlet design is limited to classical shapes for the supersonic portion of the inlet (i.e., rectangular or half/full axisymmetric) due to the use of semi-empirical codes that are restricted to this limited set of possible shapes; and, are limited to lofting the subsonic diffuser downstream of the terminal shock to meet the required average Mach number at the compressor face. CRAFT Tech will address the limitations of conventional design techniques with an innovative three-dimension design methodology based on computational fluid dynamics and multi-variant design optimization that will produce inlets that meet more stringent requirements for compact designs.