Far-field sonic boom prediction considering atmospheric turbulence effects: An improved approach

Accurate prediction of sonic boom is one of key challenges for the design of a low-boom supersonic aircraft. For most of available far-field prediction methods, the effect of atmospheric turbulence appearing in the planetary boundary layer cannot be considered, which results in remarkable inaccuracy of predicting ground-level sonic boom waveform. Although some efforts have been made to overcome the shortcoming, the turbulence effects are not yet well described so far. This article proposes an improved method by extending the two-dimensional Heterogeneous One-Way Approximation for the Resolution of Diffraction (HOWARD) equation to account for the axial and transverse convections of wind fluctuation as well as the effect of temperature fluctuation. The proposed method is validated by comparing the predictions with the flight-test data of JAXA D-SEND#1 LBM, which shows that the result of the proposed method is in better agreement with the flight-test data than that of the method without considering atmospheric turbulence effects. Then, distortion mechanism of sonic boom waveforms caused by atmospheric turbulence is analyzed by using the proposed method. It is indicated that the effect of turbulent convection makes uniform sonic-boom wavefronts irregular, which creates the condition of diffraction effect to perturb waveforms. Finally, the proposed method is applied to investigate the behavior of two types of waveforms given by the sonic boom minimization theory. Results show that a far-field waveform with a weaker initial shock is more beneficial for low-boom design of a supersonic aircraft.