A method has been devised for the design of hypersonic inward turning inlets.On condition that the Mach number distribution along the surface has been given

this method applied the rotational method of characteristics to design the basic axisymmetric flowfield and applied stream tracing techniques to generate an inviscid configuration

and then

designed final inlets with viscous correction.Several categories of typical basic flowfield designed under the same constraint were analyzed comparatively.The hypersonic inward turning inlets with circular shape intake were designed using the basic flowfield of arc tangent Mach number distribution.The numerical simulation results indicate that the category of inlets has good mass capture ratio and compression efficiency.This design method is feasible and extends the scope of basic flowfield

so it deserves further investigations.