Supersonic resurgence?

[annodomini2]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/16/supersonic...

Surprised this or something similar hasn't been posted.

So could we be seeing a resurgence of modern Supersonic commercial jets?

[Simpo Two]

Not convinced. Can you extend the logic to a triplane?

[davepoth]

Simpo Two said:

Not convinced. Can you extend the logic to a triplane?

Seems vaguely sensible to me - The sonic boom hits itself between the two wings rather than the ground. The clever bit is the gap between the two wings so yes, a triplane would work.

[Simpo Two]

Are we not introducing an awful lot of extra drag just to save/reduce a boom?

[davepoth]

Simpo Two said:

Are we not introducing an awful lot of extra drag just to save/reduce a boom?

A biplane doesn't have any more drag intrinsically - you need the same amount of lift (and therefore drag) regardless of how many wings you have. However, the sonic boom must use a lot of energy, and so mitigating that will help a lot.

[Dr Jekyll]

davepoth said:

A biplane doesn't have any more drag intrinsically - you need the same amount of lift (and therefore drag) regardless of how many wings you have. However, the sonic boom must use a lot of energy, and so mitigating that will help a lot.

Isn't there a problem making both wings work efficiently? I'd have thought ideally you want high pressure below both wings and low pressure above, and biplanes certainly don't seem to have half the wingspan of monoplanes.

[///ajd]

It's clever.

The sonic boom is a big problem that needs to be solved for the next gen aircraft otherwise they will be unable to be used effectively.

Funny if the answer ends up looking and acting like skywalkers x wing from 1977. Wings together subsonic, split supersonic maybe.

[IanMorewood]

Yep and with no boom you should be OK to overland across Asia and the US opening up markets that Concorde could never serve efficiently.

[navier_stokes]

This concept has been known for decades - it is in most textbooks on compressible flow. Supersonic intakes on military aircraft have similar shock structures.

The tricky thing is that you can only really optimise the shock canceling effects at one flight condition - any other condition is likely to introduce significant amounts of loss. If you get it wrong the results can be very bad!

[dr_gn]

Could an annular wing concept be used? Thinking the wing would be like the intake on, say an E-E Lightning, MiG 21 or even the SR-71 (where the shock cone could be tuned to get the cone to hit the edge of the intake lip at different speeds)? If the cone could be tuned to hit inside the annular wing, could the geometry be arranged to cancel the wave to some degree?