Low-boom aerodynamic design and assessment of long-range supersonic passenger aircraft

With the growth of global air travel demand and advances in science and technology, research on supersonic passenger aircraft has regained attention. To expand the market and achieve commercial success, aerodynamic configurations for next-generation supersonic passenger aircrafts must not only exhibit low-boom characteristics but also satisfy practical engineering requirements. The research team first validated numerical methods for near-field flow and far-field sonic boom prediction and proposed a low-boom inverse design process based on targeted equivalent area and near-field signals. Focusing on engineering challenges encountered in commercial supersonic operations, the main design requirements, including passenger capacity, range, and sonic boom level, were established. A conceptual design for a long-range supersonic airliner is then developed using an inverse design approach based on target cross-sectional area distributions to generate an initial configuration. This configuration is further refined through low-boom inverse shaping with target near-field signals, incorporating a s-shaped mid-fuselage, a quiet spike, and a quiet bump to effectively reduce sonic boom on ground. Aerodynamic performance evaluation of the refined configuration showed that it meets the passenger capacity and range requirements, while highlighting several issues to address in future development, including strong longitudinal aerodynamic nonlinearity, reduced directional static stability at high angles of attack, and significant intake distortion at high sideslip angles, which provides a feasible technical pathway for designing supersonic passenger aircraft that balance low sonic boom and engineering constraints.