Development of Installed Propulsion Performance Model for Efficient Supersonic Air Vehicle Design 2014-01-2133

For the design process of the class of aircraft known as an efficient supersonic air vehicle, particular attention must be paid to the propulsion system design as a whole including installation effects integrated into a vehicle performance model. The propulsion system assumed for the efficient supersonic air vehicle considered in this paper is a three-stream variable cycle engine. A computational model has been built with the Numerical Propulsion System Simulation (NPSS) software to analyze this engine. This engine model was based on the generic adaptive turbine engine model developed at the turbine engines division of the US Air Force Research Laboratory. Along with this variable cycle NPSS model, a three-ramp external compression inlet model meant for conceptual design has been developed. This model will be used to capture inlet installation effects, including those attributable to angle of attack changes at supersonic Mach numbers. These models have been integrated into the Service ORiented Computing EnviRonment (SORCER), which enables parallel execution of the installed NPSS model to rapidly evaluate a full flight envelope. The SORCER-enabled NPSS model is used to produce an engine deck with an expanded selection of variable state parameters compared to a standard conceptual level engine deck. These parameters are the inlet angle of attack, inlet flow bleed percentage and flow holding percentage. This multiparameter engine data was used to evaluate the performance of an ESAV aircraft system model. The results of the evaluation show that the additional nontraditional variable parameters included in the engine deck are significant and are worthwhile to consider in aircraft design work.