At flight speeds, the residence time for atmospheric air ingested into a scramjet inlet and exiting from the engine nozzle is on the order of a millisecond. Therefore, fuel injected into the air must efficiently mix within tens of microseconds and react to release its energy in the combustor. The overall combustion process should be mixing controlled to provide a stable operating environment; i...

Experimental and flight data for hypersonic air-breathing vehicles are both difficult and extremely expensive to obtain, motivating the use of computational tools to enhance our understanding of the complex physics involved. One of the major difficulties in simulating this regime is the interaction between combustion and turbulence, both of which are intrinsically complex processes. This work r...

This paper describes a parallel procedure for anisotropic mesh adaptation with boundary layers for use in scalable CFD simulations. The parallel mesh adaptation algorithm operates with local mesh modification operations developed for both unstructured and boundary layer parts of the mesh. The adaptive approach maintains layered elements near the viscous walls and accounts for the mesh modificat...

The influence of the in-stream pylon and strut on the performance of scramjet combustor was experimentally and numerically investigated. The experiments were conducted with a direct-connect supersonic model combustor equipped with multiple cavities. The entrance parameter of combustor corresponds to scramjet flight Mach number 4.0 with a total temperature of 947 K. The research results show tha...

This paper presents the results of an effort to optimize a conceptual design of a conical (wingedcone) single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle. The vehicle employs a rocket-based combined-cycle (RBCC) engine capable of four different operating modes ejector, ramjet, scramjet, and rocket. The RBCC engine offers higher engine thrust-to-weight ratios than competing airbreathing engine cycles while ma...