Title:
An Integrated Framework for Evaluating Commercial Supersonic Aircraft Design Trade-offs and Operational Constraints
An Integrated Framework for Evaluating Commercial Supersonic Aircraft Design Trade-offs and Operational Constraints
Author(s)
Wen, Jiajie
Advisor(s)
Mavris, Dimitri N.
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Abstract
Ever since the Concorde performed its final flight in 2003, the world might finally see a new commercial supersonic transport (SST) by the end of the decade. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the commercial aviation industry, an SST could provide operators with the opportunity to offer unique services and differentiate themselves from competitors when the industry recovers.
A civil supersonic aircraft can greatly boost the productivity of onboard passengers by significantly reducing trip time. However, this benefit comes at the expense of additional fuel consumption and en-route noise. Most countries prohibit civil supersonic overland flight due to the disturbance of sonic boom, and such restriction is not likely to be lifted for a large commercial supersonic aircraft to cruise over land at full supersonic speeds. By analyzing the performance characteristics of SSTs, as well as the commercial aviation flight network and market demand, it becomes obvious that SSTs should be regarded as specialty products.
Traditional aircraft design is driven by a fixed set of design requirements. These requirements are imposed during aircraft sizing in the conceptual design stage and followed by appropriate network and operations analyses. Due to the relatively limited use cases of an SST, conducting network-level operational analysis can greatly inform the definition of design requirements (such as supersonic cruise Mach number and design range). Furthermore, operational considerations such as limitations on overland cruise Mach number and en-route sonic boom propagation can both have direct impact on the success of future commercial supersonic operations. This research does not take into account low-boom designs, as they are improbable choices for larger commercial supersonic jets. Instead, this thesis attempts to address the lack of feedback between conventional SST design requirement definition and its network as well as operations. The research consists of three main steps:
• Improving the current supersonic flight routing capability (based on rasterized search algorithm) by including aircraft mission analysis and sonic boom carpet estimation.
• Creating a network simplification technique that simplifies a forecasted supersonic flight network in 2050 while retaining its underlying structure.
• Using the developed flight routing capability and network simplification technique to evaluate the impact of different mission performance requirements and operational constraints.
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Date Issued
2023-08-25
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Text
Resource Subtype
Dissertation