Research on a new concept first stage of TSTO launch vehicle configuration
- Paper number
IAC-17,D2,IP,15,x39796
- Author
Mr. Guoxiang Zhu, China
- Coauthor
Mr. Xiaobin Liu, Beijing Aerospace Technology Institute, China
- Year
2017
- Abstract
The flight Mach number of the first stage of TSTO (Two-Stage-To-Orbit) vehicle varied for 0-6+. Conventional vehicle configurations, such as airplane or wave-rider shapes, could not have high aerodynamic efficiency in such a wide speed range. The bi-directional flying wing concept consisted of a symmetric “diamond” planform. It flew with a high aspect ratio shape at subsonic speed, then started changing flying mode, which means the aircraft rotated 90 degrees with vertical axis, and finally flew with a low aspect ratio shape at hypersonic speed. This concept was considered a new way to overcome the design conflict between subsonic and hypersonic flight. In this paper, a first stage of TSTO vehicle with the concept of bi-directional flying wing was constructed. Computational fluid dynamics results showed that, compared with German TSTO launch vehicle – Sanger, the new concept aircraft had a 30\%-50\% higher lift-to-drag ratio at subsonic speed, reaching 16; while maintained a high lift-to-drag ratio at hypersonic speed, reaching 4. The result suggested it be a potential aerodynamic configuration for TSTO system. This paper also examined two technology challenges of the vehicle: the method to control the vehicle rotating in flying mode change process, and the difficulty in longitudinal stability design at both flying modes. Feasible approaches by aerodynamic designing and optimization ware proposed, making contributions to the realization of suck kind of vehicles.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
(absent)