Abstract:The inlet/engine matching principle of target drone propulsion system is important to evaluate the engine working characteristics. To obtain the inlet/engine matching performance of a target drone, the investigation of the S-shaped inlet and small turbojet engine matching characteristic is carried out in this paper, by combining inlet/engine matching ground test with inlet suction experiment. It concentrates the influence of the S-shaped inlet on the engine characteristics. And an engineering method is produced to evaluate the small engine characteristics on ground running, by building the connections between the inlet/engine matching ground test and inlet suction experiment. It"s shown that the performance of engine in matching ground test is mainly affected by the S-shaped inlet characteristic parameters. When the full scale S-shaped inlet installed, the engine performance is no longer as good as the craft inlet installed, but falls. As the engine rotating speed enhanced, the mass flow increases, and the inlet performance gets worse. The total pressure recovery coefficient at the inlet exit decreases and the distortion index rises, which has a negative effect on the engine performance, resulting in the thrust smaller and the fuel consumption larger. Moreover, the proposed method can reliably evaluate the small engine characteristic parameters under matching ground condition based on the experimental data, so it is effective on engineering application.