Giovanni FASULO, Sébastien HENGY, Bastien MARTINEZ, Luigi FEDERICO, Luciano DE VIVO, Marie ALBISSER, Andreas ZEINER
DOI number: XXX-YYY-ZZZ
Conference number: HiSST-2024-0027
In spite of the limited success of the Concorde, the last two decades have seen a resurgence of interest in commercial supersonic flight. In this context, the European Commission has funded the STRATOFLY project, under the Horizon 2020 plan, to assess the potential of some innovative high-speed aircraft configurations and to identify and mature the technologies needed to overcome the main obstacles to their deployment. In particular, the massive thunder-like noise produced when an aircraft breaks through the sound barrier represents one of the most persistent challenges of the supersonic regime. For this reason, a great deal of effort is devoted to the construction of various demonstrators to investigate the effects of different aircraft features on the sonic boom intensity. Through collaboration between ISL and CIRA, a series of outdoor investigation activities are and will be undertaken to provide a large amount of high-quality experimental data suitable for both sonic boom characterization and validation/refinement of current or novel analytical techniques for sonic boom estimation. The first test campaign, consisting of five free-flight tests, was carried out at the ISL (Saint-Louis, France) firing range (on 4th and 5th October 2022) on a reduced and slightly modified version of the STRATOFLY MR3 vehicle, launched with a 91 mm powder cannon at an initial Mach number of about 4.7. To measure the sonic boom, ISL and CIRA deployed various types of sensors in the field. The gathered data were then post-processed to provide a sonic boom directivity diagram of the model and a comparison with the Whitham’s modified linear theory predictions.