High-order sonic boom modeling based on adaptive methods

This paper presents an accurate approach to simulate the sonic boom of supersonic aircrafts. 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 L p 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).