New Biplane Design Stops Sonic Booms | Silent Supersonic Aircraft | LiveScience
A supersonic biplane concept created by Kazuhiro Kusunose and colleagues at Tohoku University in Japan. CREDIT: Institute of Fluid Science | Tohoku University
A newer version of the biplane could reach supersonic cruising speeds without causing ear-splitting sonic booms, according to computer simulations by MIT and Stanford University researchers. They built upon the design of German engineer Adolf Busemann, who originally envisioned triangular wings connected at their tips.
A biplane to break the sound barrier - MIT News Office
Wang and his colleagues Rui Hu, a postdoc in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Antony Jameson, a professor of engineering at Stanford University, have shown through a computer model that a modified biplane can, in fact, produce significantly less drag than a conventional single-wing aircraft at supersonic cruise speeds. The group will publish their results in the Journal of Aircraft.
This decreased drag, according to Wang, means the plane would require less fuel to fly. It also means the plane would produce less of a sonic boom.
“The sonic boom is really the shock waves created by the supersonic airplanes, propagated to the ground,” Wang says. “It’s like hearing gunfire. It’s so annoying that supersonic jets were not allowed to fly over land.”
Sonic boom - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A sonic boom is the sound associated with the shock waves created by an object traveling through the air faster than the speed of sound. Sonic booms generate enormous amounts of sound energy, sounding much like an explosion. The crack of a supersonic bullet passing overhead is an example of a sonic boom in miniature.
A sonic boom produced by an aircraft moving at M=2.92, calculated from the cone angle of 20 degrees. An observer hears the boom when the shock wave, on the edges of the cone, crosses his or her location.
Mach cone angle
