Aerodynamic design optimization of hypersonic vehicles considering lift matching

Wide-speed-range aerodynamic design remains one of the critical bottlenecks in the development of horizontal takeoff and landing aerospace planes. These vehicles operate across an exceptionally broad flight envelope, encountering significant variations in both dynamic pressure and atmospheric conditions. The disparity in required lift across low-speed and high-speed regimes leads to conflicting demands on the lifting surface sizing, introducing considerable challenges in achieving an aerodynamically balanced configuration throughout the entire mission profile. Specifically, satisfying the lift requirements for low-speed takeoff typically results in excessive lifting surface area under high-speed conditions, causing a marked deviation from the optimal lift-to-drag ratio and limiting the vehicle’s aerodynamic efficiency. To address this challenge, we first analyze the lift matching requirements associated with wide-speed-range operations of horizontal takeoff aerospace planes. A global aerodynamic optimization framework is then developed, explicitly incorporating lift matching constraints into the configuration design process. The proposed methodology is applied to the wing planform and airfoil shape optimization of the Sanger aerospace plane carrier aircraft. Under the constraint of meeting low-speed takeoff lift requirements, the optimized wing achieves an improvement of 20.00% in the available lift-to-drag ratio under supersonic conditions and 8.12% under hypersonic conditions, effectively mitigating the aerodynamic efficiency degradation at high speeds. Finally, the optimization framework is extended to account for fuselage-wing aerodynamic interference effects, and its applicability to full-vehicle configuration aerodynamic optimization is demonstrated.