Computational Support for 9x7 Wind Tunnel Test of Sonic Boom Models with Plumes

Speaker: James Jensen, NASA Ames Research Center
March 14, 2017

Presentation

Abstract

NASA and its industry partners are performing studies of supersonic aircraft concepts with low sonic boom pressure signatures. The interaction of the nozzle jet flow with the aircrafts’ aft components is typically where the greatest uncertainly in the pressure signature is observed with high-fidelity numerical simulations. An extensive wind tunnel test was conducted in February 2016 in the NASA Ames 9- by 7- Foot Supersonic Wind Tunnel to help address the nozzle jet effects on sonic boom. Five test models with a variety of shock generators of differing waveforms and strengths were tested with a convergent-divergent nozzle for a wide range of nozzle pressure ratios. The LAVA unstructured flow solver was used to generate first CFD comparisons with the new experimental database using best practice meshing and analysis techniques for sonic boom vehicle design for all five different configurations. LAVA was also used to redesign the internal flow path of the nozzle and to better understand the flow field in the test section, both of which significantly improved the quality of the test data.

Biography

James Jensen received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in aerospace engineering with a focus on aeronautics from Arizona State University (2014 and 2015 respectively). Since then he has been employed as a research engineer with the Computational Aerosciences and the Wind Tunnel Systems branches at NASA Ames Research Center. His work focuses mainly on applied computational fluid dynamics. He has been involved with work on the MIT D8, Low Boom Flight Demonstrator (LBFD), and Single-aisle Turboelectric Aircraft with Aft Boundary Layer Propulsor (STARC-ABL) aircraft concepts.

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