Over the past two decades, there has been a renewed interest in the development of a new generation of supersonic aircraft for civil purposes that could potentially succeed Concorde. However, the noise annoyance is still considered one of the hampering factors to meet public consensus. This paper aims at revealing the potential of numerical simulations to predict sonic boom signature in Near Field at early design stages. In particular, the paper further demonstrates the applicability of the numerical approach proposed by NASA and other partners during the Sonic Boom Prediction Workshops held between 2014 and 2021, to compute the pressure signature of aircraft in the zone close to it. The results highlight the suitability of the approach (1) to capture the impact of aircraft flight condition variations on the sonic boom signature, (2) to enable the characterization of novel aircraft layout, including Mach 5 waverider configuration, (3) to provide near-field shock wave noise predictions that can be used to evaluate shock propagation, on-ground signature analyses, and annoyance assessment.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of simplified and high-fidelity sonic boom prediction methods to assess their applicability in the conceptual design of supersonic aircraft. The high-fidelity approach combines Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for near-field shock analysis with ray-tracing and the Augmented Burgers Equation for far-field propagation through a non-uniform atmosphere, whereas the simplified Carlson method uses analytical approximations for rapid predictions. The comparison across selected climb, cruise, and descent conditions for a supersonic reference aircraft shows that the Carlson method captures general trends in sonic boom behavior, such as changes in peak overpressure and signal duration with varying Mach number and altitude. However, significant deviations are noted under realistic atmospheric conditions, highlighting limitations in the simplified model’s accuracy. Common psycho-acoustic metrics were evaluated to assess the potential annoyance on the ground. The results demonstrate that while the simplified method is effective for early-stage design assessments, the high-fidelity model is essential for precise sonic boom characterization under realistic conditions, particularly for regulatory and community impact evaluations.

The Matching Chart is a well-established tool in conceptual and preliminary aircraft design, providing a graphical representation of performance requirements based on wing loading (W/S) and thrust-to-weight ratio (T/W). It helps define a feasible design space while estimating key parameters such as thrust, maximum takeoff weight, and wing area. This paper presents a new numerical approach aimed at incorporating constraints related to sonic boom generated by supersonic aircraft in flight within the Matching Chart. The sonic boom constraint is derived from high-fidelity CFD simulations on similar case studies and atmospheric propagation models within a non-uniform atmosphere. The methodology is evaluated on an 80-passenger, Mach 1.5 aircraft, a configuration aligned with recent industry research. By integrating environmental and regulatory factors, this work enhances the Matching Chart’s applicability to enable more sustainable future supersonic aircraft design.

Sonic boom CFD near-field analysis of a Mach 5 configuration S. Graziani [button link="https://www.mrforum.com/wp-content/uploads/open_access/9781644902677/

The following paper discuss the near field sonic boom results obtained with CFD simulations regarding a Mach 5 wave rider configuration derived from the STRATOFLY heritage. Sonic boom near field have emerged as a vital tool for the mitigation and understanding of the impact of supersonic and hypersonic aircraft configurations. The work done discusses the major consideration in the CFD approach for the flow field simulations in the vicinity of the aircraft, including grid generation techniques based on the NASA sonic boom predictions workshop carried out between 2014 and 2020 and the results obtained for different flight conditions and operations. The near field simulation necessitates of accurate predictions of shock wave propagation generated by the aircraft, employing the high-fidelity numerical schemes and turbulence models. These results will be the input for our propagation tool that manage to propagate the shocks from the aircraft to the ground. This work is carried out within the MORE&LESS project, that is an EU-funded project and has the aim to investigate the environmental impact of supersonic aircraft through multi-fidelity simulations and test campaigns for creating multidisciplinary holistic framework for the evaluation of the future supersonic aircraft, trajectories, and operations.