Research status and development trend of air-breathing high-speed vehicle/engine integration

Abstract

Air-breathing vehicles, a crucial field of the aerospace industry in recent years, are required to have exceptional flight performance in a wide range. As a practical and essential way to realize efficient flight, the integration design emerges as a prominent characteristic of air-breathing vehicles. This article reviews and analyzes the design connotation, critical progress, and technical attributes of high-speed air-breathing integration vehicles, including supersonic aerodynamics/propulsion integration, hypersonic cruise-type airframe/engine integration, and wide-range aircraft/engine integration. In the supersonic aerodynamics/propulsion integrated design phase, creating a vehicle with excellent maneuverability and stealth performance has become the design focus. While in the hypersonic cruise-type airframe/engine integrated design phase, designers proposed various rotational symmetrical slender body and lifting-body configurations to match the scramjet engines. This provided strong support for breaking through thrust-drag matching in hypersonic cruise. For wide-range aircraft/engine integration vehicles, a more complex service environment imposes higher requirements on their levels of integration. The progression from supersonic aerodynamics/propulsion integration to hypersonic cruise-type airframe/engine integration, and further to wide-range aircraft/engine integration, signifies the exploration of air-breathing aircraft towards wider speed range and broader airspace. Finally, a detailed analysis of the distinctions among these three types of integrated vehicles is presented, and the development proposals and trends of wide-range aircraft/engine integration vehicles are discussed.