Summary of the 2008 NASA Fundamental Aeronautics Program Sonic Boom Prediction Workshop

The Supersonics Project of the NASA Fundamental Aeronautics Program organized an internal sonic boom workshop to evaluate near-field sonic-boom prediction capability at the Fundamental Aeronautics Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, on 8 October 2008. Workshop participants computed sonic-boom signatures for three nonlifting bodies and two lifting configurations. Cone–cylinder, parabolic, and quartic bodies of revolution comprised the nonlifting cases. The lifting configurations were a simple 69 deg delta-wing–body and a complete low-boom transport configuration designed during the High Speed Research Project in the 1990s with wing, body, tail, nacelle, and boundary-layer diverter components. The AIRPLANE, Cart3D, FUN3D, and USM3D flow solvers were employed with the ANET signature propagation tool, output-based adaptation, and a priori adaptation based on freestream Mach number and angle of attack. Results were presented orally at the workshop. This article documents the workshop and results and provides c...