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Arrive Before Leaving, The Challenge of Supersonic Aircraft Design

AMS Seminar Series

Speaker: Francisco Palacios, Stanford University

Presentation

Abstract

For supersonic aircraft to be commercially viable, they must produce sufficiently quiet sonic boom that they can be allowed to fly supersonically over land. As part of the NASA Supersonics Project N+2 effort and in collaboration with Lockheed Martin Corporation, our group at Stanford University has been developing tools to make such supersonic aircraft possible. In this seminar, I will review our research on high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools and adjoint-based techniques for the optimal aerodynamic shape design of low-boom supersonic aircraft.

While there is a well-consolidated theory for the application of adjoint methods to optimal shape design, the use of these techniques in the supersonic regime is challenging due to a range of technical and mathematical issues that will be discussed in this presentation. In particular, the supersonic low-boom application will be used to introduce original contributions to the state-of-the-art in CFD-based aerodynamic shape design: a systematic approach to the continuous adjoint method, inverse design using the equivalent area distributions, and design with discontinuities, among other topics.

This seminar would like to acknowledge the work of Prof. Juan J. Alonso, T. Lukaczyk, G. Carrier, and M. Buonanno.

Biography

Photo of Francisco Palacios
Palacios is an Engineering Research Associate at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. His main areas of expertise include optimal aerodynamic shape design, large-scale multi-physics CFD simulations, and numerical analysis. Prior to his arrival at Stanford University in 2011, Palacios was research lead for technological innovation at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies in Mathematics and scientific coordinator of the Airbus program “Future Simulation Concepts,” introducing and developing the continuous adjoint technique in the Airbus aerodynamic design tools. From 2011 to 2013, Palacios was responsible for the development of the main RANS solver for the Stanford PSAAP center, and for the research in adjoint-based methodologies to manage the numerical, aleatory, and epistemic uncertainties that are present in hypersonic combustion environments.

Currently, Palacios' research is focused on supersonic aircraft design and the development of novel adjoint-based design techniques applied to multi-physics problems. He is the lead developer of the SU2 (su2.stanford.edu) suite, a very successful open-source software for aerodynamic simulation and design with ~10.000 downloads since its first release (two years ago). In fact, because of its strong commitment to education, the SU2 team has recently released SU2 EDUCATIONAL to bring CFD closer to engineering students and aircraft enthusiasts.