Research of low boom and low drag supersonic aircraft design

Sonic boom reduction will be an issue of utmost importance in future supersonic transport, due to strong regulations on acoustic nuisance. The paper describes a new multi-objective optimization method for supersonic aircraft design. The method is developed by coupling Seebass–George–Darden (SGD) inverse design method and multi-objective genetic algorithm. Based on the method, different codes are developed. Using a computational architecture, a conceptual supersonic aircraft design environment (CSADE) is constructed. The architecture of CSADE includes inner optimization level and out optimization level. The low boom configuration is generated in inner optimization level by matching the target equivalent area distribution and actual equivalent area distribution. And low boom/low drag configuration is generated in outer optimization level by using NSGA-II multi-objective genetic algorithm to optimize the control parameters of SGD method and aircraft shape. Two objective functions, low sonic boom and low wave drag, are considered in CSADE. Physically reasonable Pareto solutions are obtained from the present optimization. Some supersonic aircraft configurations are selected from Pareto front and the optimization results indicate that the swept forward wing configuration has benefits in both sonic boom reduction and wave drag reduction. The results are validated by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis.