High-order sonic boom modeling based on adaptive methods

This paper presents an accurate approach to simulate the sonic boom of supersonic air-crafts. The near-field flow is modeled by the conservative Euler equations and is solved using a vertex-centered finite volume approach on adapted unstructured tetrahedral meshes. A metric-based anisotropic mesh adaptation is considered to control the interpolation error in LP norm. Then, from the CFD solution, the pressure distribution under the aircraft is extracted and used to set up the initial conditions of the propagation algorithm in the far-field. The pressure distribution is propagated down to the ground in order to obtain the sonic boom signature using a ray tracing algorithm based upon the Thomas waveform parameter method. In this study, a sonic boom sensitivity analysis is carried out on several aircraft designs (low-drag and low-boom shapes). (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.