Novel Simplified Numerical Simulation Method for Modeling Bleed Holes in Supersonic Inlets

A novel simplified numerical simulation method for bleed holes in supersonic inlets was developed to estimate the bleed mass flow rate and simulate the flowfield structure in the bleed region. First, the Prandtl–Meyer expansion theory was employed to calculate the location of the barrier shock and reconstruct the flow structure inside the bleed hole. Next, a novel discrimination algorithm was developed to distinguish the grids connected to the bleed hole in the bleed zone instead of directly modeling the hole opening and plenum chamber. Finally, the bleed mass flow rate was obtained based on the boundary-layer properties in the bleed region and the fitting scaled coefficients. This method was also evaluated by performing numerical simulations for a series of different bleeding situations. For all the examined cases, the simulation results were in good agreement with the experimental data, and the number of grid points’ requirement for modeling the bleed hole as compared with the fully resolved method was considerably reduced. Moreover, the proposed method was successfully applied to simulate porous bleed systems in a mixed-compression supersonic inlet. This illustrates that the proposed method is expected to be a useful engineering tool for designing the bleed system of the supersonic inlets.