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Wall cavities have been widely used as flameholders in scramjet engines to prolong the residence time of the fuel and the air in supersonic flow. These devices improve the combustion efficiency of the scramjet combustor, and also impose additional drag on the engine. In this paper, the two-dimensional coupled implicit NS equations, the standard k–ε turbulence model and the finite-rate/eddy-dissipation reaction model have been applied to simulate numerically the combustion flow field of a hydrogen-fueled scramjet combustor with a cavity flameholder. The effects of the geometric parameters, i.e. the upstream depth, the ratio of the length to the upstream depth, the ratio of the downstream to the upstream depth and the swept angle, on the drag force of the cavity flameholder for a heated flow are investigated using the variance analysis method. The obtained results show that the variance analysis method can be …