To work with high cruise efficiency, the High Speed Civil Transport (HSCT)
inlet is designed to work under the so called ``critical operation''. 
The critical operation locates a terminal shock just downstream of the 
throat to maintain high total pressure recovery with the maximum mass flow. 
However, the terminal shock location is very sensitive to disturbance and 
can be pushed out of the inletto cause the inlet unstart. The inlet unstart
will introduce instability to the 
whole aircraft and may also cause engine surge. The propulsion system
works inefficiently when an inlet unstarts. 
Click <a href="http://athos.rutgers.edu/hpcd/Area_II.1/index.html"> here</a>
for more information.<p>

The purpose of our current project is to coordinate our 
<a href="http://www.caip.rutgers.edu/~xswang/object-segment/object.html">
feature extraction</a> and 
<a href="http://www.caip.rutgers.edu/~xswang/feature/">feature tracking</a> 
and other visualization techniques for the 
HSCT inlet Unstart problem at angle of attack for an 
axisymmetric center/cowl arrangement. 
We expect that the visualization will help to come up with a reduced modeling
with a parameter space, including mach no, center/cowl geometry, bleed 
parameters which allows us to predict unstart.<P>

<IMG SRC="inlet2.gif" align=middle> <br>
<center>NASA VDC inlet cross section</center><P>

<IMG SRC="cmesh.gif" align=middle> <br>
<center>The mesh for simulation</center><P>