An Unstructured Wave Drag code for the Preliminary Design of Future Supersonic Aircraft

Abstract

In a preliminary design environment, the designer needs to have freedom to quickly evaluate different configurations and come up with the most promising configuration. In the supersonic regime, most linearized codes that are available today can only handle specific shapes and configurations. These codes only aid in optimizing conventional configurations and do not span the entire space of possible shapes, which include revolutionary and unconventional configurations. This paper proposes using a set of GNU libraries and analyses codes to overcome the shortcomings of the legacy codes. It is known that any surface can be discretized into triangles using efficient Delaunay triangulation algorithms. The proposed method involves creating a triangulated aircraft from a generic CAD environment, using the set of geometric libraries and then performing necessary surface operations for the desired result, which in our case is the calculation of the wave drag. Linearized methods for wave drag estimation call for the calculation of the intercepted areas of the aircraft with a Mach cone and the GNU libraries help us in obtaining these areas. Finally, in order to validate the code, the new code is used to compute the wave-drag of a Sears-Haack body and F-16 and the results are compared to the results from AWAVE, the Harris Wave Drag program.