Assessment of Sonic Boom Loudness of Supersonic Aircraft using Reduced Order Modeling

The development of novel supersonic passenger aircraft is dependent on the mitigation of sonic boom loudness to acceptable levels. However, the propagation of the pressure signature through the atmosphere requires access to the precise aerodynamic field around the aircraft, which can be computationally expense to acquire. This challenge is further exacerbated in multi-query problems, such as design space exploration and uncertainty quantification, as the simulation cost becomes prohibitive. This study introduces a reduced order modeling strategy to predict the near-field pressure signature of the aircraft and rapidly evaluate the sonic boom loudness. The performance of this approach is assessed for inviscid supersonic flow over a low-boom aircraft configuration at varying Mach numbers and atmospheric conditions using several integrated and field-level error metrics. The results of the study illustrate the robustness and efficiency of the methodology in sparse data sets and predicting high-dimensional fields generated during supersonic aircraft design.