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.

This study investigates the numerical prediction of the sonic boom phenomenon in supersonic aircraft by evaluating the near-field pressure signatures of three different aeroshapes. Two computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers, the open-source SU2 Multiphysics code and ANSYS Fluent, were employed to assess their effectiveness in modeling the aerodynamic flow field. A preliminary validation of numerical methods was conducted against numerical data available from the Sonic Boom Prediction Workshops (SBPW) organized by NASA, ensuring simulation reliability. Particular attention is paid to the topology of the mesh grid, exploring hybrid approaches that combine structured and unstructured grids to optimize the accuracy of pressure wave transmission. In addition, different numerical schemes were analyzed to determine the best practices for sonic boom simulations. The proposed methodology was finally applied to three supersonic aircraft developed within the European project MORE&LESS, demonstrating the capability of the model to estimate shock wave generation, evaluate the aeroacoustic performance of different supersonic aeroshapes from Mach 2 to Mach 5, and provide predictions to support ground-level noise assessment. The findings of this study contribute to the definition of a comprehensive workflow for sonic boom evaluation, providing a reliable methodology for exploring future supersonic aircraft designs.