INVESTIGATION ON SIDEWALL COMPRESSION SCRAMJET INLET

The flow field in a sidewall compression scramjet inlet is studied using the surface oil dot visualization, pressure measurements and numerical simulations.Two types of sidewall scramjet inlets with or without a strut are investigated.It is shown that a pair of converse vortices emanate from the fin-plate junction and then depart from the baseplate,which results in a region with low Mach number and low total pressure at the inlet exit. Furthermore,it is shown that the boundary layer separation on the sidewall and baseplate resulting from a strut degrades the performance of the inlet.