Flow response hysteresis of throat regulation process of a two-dimensional mixed-compression supersonic inlet

The variable geometry supersonic inlet tends to decrease the throat area to reduce the Mach number upstream of the terminal shock, so as to reduce the flow loss. However, excessive Internal Contraction Ratio (ICR) exposes the inlet to a greater risk of unstart, which inevitably results in a process of increasing the throat area to aid the inlet restart. In the above throat regulation process, the inlet undergoes the start, unstart, and restart states in turn. In order to reveal the flow structure and mechanism of this process, a two-dimensional unsteady numerical simulation combined with a dynamic mesh technique were employed. The shock-on-lip Mach number of the studied inlet is 4.0 and the flight angle of attack is + 6°. Analysis was focused on the state with a freestream Mach number of 3.0. The results clearly show that the flow response hysteresis appears, and restart is only realized when the throat area is obviously increased as compared to that of unstart due to the historical unstart flow structure. In addition, three typical flow fields were analyzed, and it is found that the separation ahead of the inlet was the key factor affecting the hysteresis. Finally, unstart and restart boundaries of the inlet were discussed, and the factors influencing its deviation from the typical boundaries of dual-solution area were analyzed. The newly predicted unstart and restart boundaries are much closer to the CFD results.