Shock–Plume Interaction Near-Field Summary for the Third AIAA Sonic Boom Prediction Workshop

Abstract

The Third AIAA Sonic Boom Prediction Workshop was held during January 2020, on the weekend before the AIAA SciTech conference. The workshop consisted of two days: the first day focused on near-field computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and the second day on propagation techniques. The near-field CFD study included two configurations: one simplified shock–plume interaction case and one more complex configuration based on a design for the NASA low-boom flight demonstrator. The motivation for the workshop stems from the goal of obtaining supersonic commercial overland flight. In order to replace the current prohibition with a certification standard, an international effort is required to quantify the accuracy and reliability of prediction methods. The workshops also identify deficiencies in existing methods where further research should be focused such as issues with extrema, shock position, and grid coarseness. This paper provided a summary and comparison of the results for the shock–plume interaction case, also known as the biconvex case. Overall agreement between the participants was very good, with the largest local standard deviations due to a slight shift of the shock location, not the predicted strength of the shocks. Variation in the submission ensemble sample deviation was comparable to the experimental ensemble sample deviation, and they overlapped for most of the forward portion of the signature.