Aerodynamic Design of a Hypersonic Glide Vehicle Based on the Cone-Derived Wave rider Configuration Method

Hypersonic glide vehicles are a novel type of hypersonic weapons that have received extensive attention. These vehicles can seriously challenge any defense system by traveling long distances of about thousands of kilometers in the atmosphere at very high speeds up to more than 20 Mach. In this research, the aerodynamic design of a hypersonic glide vehicle has been done based on the wave rider theory and conical-derived wave rider Method. In this study, a parametric method with three parameters, including cone shock angle β, dihedral angle φ, and compression ratio S, was introduced and used as a design code. In the design process, the HTV2 hypersonic glide vehicle was used as a reference model. To achieve configurations with operational dimensions, by changing the design parameters, four-wave rider configurations with the same dimensions as the reference model were identified. By analyzing these four configurations using the computational fluid dynamics method, the configuration with the best aerodynamic and volume results was selected as the preferred design configuration. Compared to the reference model, the preferred configuration has 36% more aerodynamic efficiency and 15% less volume, indicating the efficiency of the used method.