Fundamental Design Optimization of an Innovative Supersonic Transport Configuration and Its Design Knowledge Extraction

Abstract

The generation of shock waves is inevitable during supersonic cruising, which results in the generation of wave drag as well as sonic boom on the ground. Some innovative concepts, such as the supersonic biplane concept and supersonic twin-body fuselage concept, have been proposed recently to reduce the supersonic wave drag dramatically. In this study, these two concepts are adopted, and then the aerodynamic and sonic boom performance of innovative supersonic transport (SST) wing-body configurations are discussed using numerical approaches. This study is performed to obtain design knowledge for the innovative SST using an optimization method. In this research, the number of design variables is limited to only three in order to obtain fundamental design knowledge of the innovative SST configuration. The three design variables are utilized to deform the wing section shape. The wing section shape of a Busemann-type-biplane/twin-body model is optimized under the conditions of a design Mach number of 1.7 and angle of attack of 2 degrees. The optimized results show the tradeoff relationship between lift-drag ratio and maximum overpressure of sonic boom distribution on the ground. To obtain detailed knowledge of the design space, analysis of variance and visualizations of response surfaces of objective functions are also performed.