Investigating Stability of Cone-Derived Hypersonic Waverider Vehicles via Design Space Exploration

It may come as no surprise that man-made objects flying at 5, 10, or even 25 the speed of sound (termed hypersonic) are difficult to design, inefficient in flight, and expensive to deploy. Most hypersonic vehicles are effectuated in ballistics, which simplify aerodynamic considerations owing to their fixed trajectory. However, maneuverable hypersonic vehicles can revolutionize commercial flight, national defense, and space travel. One candidate for such missions are waverider vehicles. Waverider vehicles cruise on a cushion of air generated by its own shock wave, essentially enjoying extra lift without any extra drag penalties (which are usually inherent to extra lift). Waveriders have been optimized by finding waverider shapes that maximize its lift-to-drag (L/D) ratio at a waverider’s normal operating cruise condition. However, such bodies may be unstable in flight and thus, cannot be realized in the real world in their pure form. This thesis aims at investigating what happens when basic flight stability requirements are considered in tandem with L/D maximization. This research generates important correlations that can be helpful to engineers hoping to investigate waverider vehicles in a preliminary stage; thus, this work and its data may prove helpful to the actual realization of maneuverable hypersonic vehicles in our day.