Summary and Statistical Analysis of the First AIAA Sonic Boom Prediction Workshop

A summary is provided for the First AIAA Sonic Boom Workshop held 11January2014 in conjunction with AIAA SciTech 2014. Near-field pressure signatures extracted from computational-fluid-dynamics solutions are gathered from 19 participants (representing three countries) for the two required cases: an axisymmetric body and a simple delta-wing configuration. Structured multiblock, unstructured mixed-element, unstructured tetrahedral, overset, and Cartesian cut-cell methods are used by the participants. Participants provided signatures computed on a series of uniformly refined workshop provided grids and participant-generated and solution-adapted grids. These submissions are propagated to the ground, and noise measures are computed. This allows the grid convergence of a noise measure and a validation metric (difference norm between computed and wind-tunnel-measured near-field signatures) to be studied for the first time. A statistical analysis is also presented for these measures. An optional configuration includes fuselage, wing, tail, flow-through nacelles, and blade sting. More variation in computed noise measures are observed for this full configuration than the required cases. Recommendations are provided for potential improvements to the analysis methods and a possible subsequent workshop.