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 context on previously available and recently developed methods.