Novel approach to dynamic shock attenuation and its validation through computational analysis

It is of great significance to develop and construct new, more efficient supersonic missiles and aircrafts including commercial ones. The one major difficulty for supersonic flight is the shock waves that produce a wave drag and sonic boom. When an object moves faster than the information about it propagates into a surrounding medium, the regions of the medium near the disturbance area cannot withdraw before the object arrives. This phenomenon creates a shock wave in front of the moving object, through which the flow turns outside almost instantaneously. This paper offers a novel dynamic approach to shock wave reduction/attenuation. An illustration of the particular implementation of the new dynamic approach using a rotating spike is considered and explained in this paper. Numerical simulations were used to validate this approach and show the shock wave attenuation by the dynamic spike that rotates. Novel dynamic approach is opening a new perspective for a supersonic missile and aircraft design and improves of the efficiency of the existing ones.