Aerodatabase Development and Integration and Mission Analysis of a Mach 2 Supersonic Civil Aircraft

Abstract

The request for faster and greener civil aviation is urging the worldwide scientific community and aerospace industry to develop a new generation of supersonic aircraft, which are expected to be environmentally sustainable and to guarantee a high-level protection of citizens. A key aspect to monitor the potential environmental impact of new configurations is the aerodynamic efficiency and its impact onto the real mission. To pursue this goal, this paper discloses increasing-fidelity aerodynamic modeling approaches to improve the conceptual design of high-speed vehicles. The disclosed methodology foresees the development of aerodynamic aerodatabases by means of incremental steps starting from simplified methods (panels methods and/or low-fidelity CFD simulations) up to very reliable data based on high-fidelity CFD simulations and experimental measurements with associated confidence levels. This multifidelity approach enables the possibility of supporting the aircraft design process at different stages of its design cycle, from the estimation of preliminary aerodynamic coefficients at the beginning of the conceptual design, up to the development of tailored aerodatabases at advanced design phases. For each design stage, a build-up approach is adopted, starting from the investigation of the clean external configuration up to the complete one, including control surfaces’ effects and, if any, the effects of the integration of the propulsive effects. In addition, the applicability of the approach is guaranteed for a wide range of supersonic and hypersonic aircraft, and the developed methodology is here applied to the characterization of Mach 2 aircraft configuration, a relevant case study of the H2020 MORE&LESS project.

Evaluation of Sonic Boom Shock Wave Generation with CFD Methods

“…The differences between an aerodynamic simulation and an aeroacoustic computation are pointed out in Figure 7, where the flow fields evaluated using those two different approaches are compared. While the aerodynamic solution leads to good results in terms of global coefficients, lift and drag values agree with the reference values [45], and the pressure flow field is completely different from the aircraft. The pressure variations are dissipated by the computational grid used in the aerodynamic simulation, while they are perfectly visible in the aeroacoustic simulation up to the far-field of the domain.…”

“…The design process starts from a set of design and operational requirements very similar to the reference Concorde aircraft: In terms of geometrical configuration, the CS1 vehicle has a classical aeronautical shape with the characteristics of Table 1. Aerodynamic and propulsive databases [45] are the basis of the definition of a reference mission. Figure 5 reports the mission profile with the variation of the aircraft altitude, with the relative angle of attack variation during flight.…”

“…The results of this work for the CS1 test case can be seen in Figure 6; the overall shape of the mesh grid highlights the expected direction of the Mach lines, while in the left zone of the figure, it is possible to notice the difference in the meshing approach in the inner zone (unstructured grid) compared to the outer zone (structured grid). The number of cells in the complete domain is approximately 21.5 million, while for a low-fidelity aerodynamic grid, it is about 2.1 million elements for the same configuration [45]. The goal of the simulations presented in this work is to propagate the pressure variations of the shock waves produced by the aircraft in the whole computational domain, avoiding numerical artifacts like artificial dissipation.…”