One of the most critical technical issues with regard to supersonic commercial transportation is the sonic boom that occurs during supersonic cruising flight, which causes impulsive noise on the ground. The ''supersonic biplane theory'' has been proposed to reduce the sonic boom. Shock wave interaction and cancellation between the wings of a supersonic biplane can be realized at a specific design Mach number, but does not work at off-design values. Here, the low-speed aerodynamic performance, as off-design performance, of a baseline supersonic biplane was investigated and discussed using experimental and computational fluid dynamics approaches. The thin airfoil stall characteristics of a supersonic biplane were shown to be caused by the stall of both upper and lower wings at an angle of attack of 20. Although there was leading flow separation of the upper wing at lower angles of attack, the stall of the lower wing was suppressed by interference with the upper wing. The lift of the lower wing was almost dominant to produce the lift of the supersonic biplane in the low-speed range. However, the lower wing caused greater drag than the upper wing at higher angles of attack.
This study focuses on the aerodynamic performance of the supersonic biplane at the low-speed region. The performance was evaluated and discussed through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Experimental Fluid Dynamics (EFD). The result of the CFD simulation was compared with the experimental result to validate the simulation and confirmed to be reliable. Therefore, the CFD results were employed to derive the aerodynamic performance coupled with the theoretical equations. In the wind tunnel experiment, the three-component force measurement was conducted to obtain lift, drag and pitching moment coefficients. The wake survey was conducted to measure the drag in detail. The results proved the low-speed aerodynamic performance of the supersonic biplane can be described by the classical "general biplane theory" reasonably well.
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