A CFD Based Parametric Analysis of S-Shaped Inlet for a Novel Blended Wing Body Aircraft

Abstract

The Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe (ACARE) has set an ambitious array of objectives to be accomplished by 2050 for civil aviation. It is often claimed that complying with those targets will not require evolution but, rather, revolution. If the growth in aviation has to be sustained in the future, then we must come up with radical aircraft and engine configurations which can meet the demands of future aviation.

The AHEAD project (co-funded by the European Commission) investigated a novel multi-fuel blended wing body aircraft with a unique propulsion system to address the challenges of the future. The engine for this aircraft uses an embedded hybrid engine exploiting the boundary layer ingestion technique to increase the propulsive efficiency.

Two major consequences of BLI are vital in this regard. Namely, loss of total pressure recovery and increased total pressure distortion at the Aerodynamic Interface Plane (AIP) or the engine fan-face. Hence, the inlet performance is measured by the total Pressure Recovery Factor (PRF) and Distortion Coefficient (DC₆₀). The current research work aims to design an embedded inlet on a Blended Wing Body (BWB) aircraft that produces maximum value of PRF and minimum DC₆₀.

The aim of this research is to investigate the S-shaped inlet to understand the effect of various geometrical parameters on its performance. The Knowledge Based Engineering platform ParaPy is used to parametrize the S-shaped inlet and generate a variety of inlet geometries and volume meshes. These different variants were analysed using the Ansys® CFD code.

Keywords: CFD, S-Shaped Inlet, Wing Body Aircraft