Cartesian Mesh Simulations and Farfield Propagation Results for the 3rd AIAA Sonic Boom Prediction Workshop

Speaker: Wade M. Spurlock, Science and Technology Corporation/NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division
March 5, 2020

Presentation

Abstract

Simulation results are presented for all test cases prescribed in the Third AIAA Sonic Boom Prediction Workshop. The workshop is decomposed into two problems: nearfield, high-fidelity CFD and farfield acoustic propagation. In our work, an inviscid, embedded-boundary Cartesian-mesh flow solver is used to compute near-field pressure signatures, which are then propagated to the ground to form “boom carpets”—pressure signatures and ground noise metrics at a range of specified distances and off-track angles. To accelerate the process and increase simulation accuracy, each near-field cylinder is automatically decomposed into several independent meshes, computed in parallel. Each mesh uses adjoint-based mesh adaptation to affordably obtain credible results. We include studies of discretization error and asymptotic mesh convergence. The resulting near-field signatures generally exhibit good convergence with mesh refinement. For an independent evaluation of results and convergence, this study includes a Richardson-based error estimation procedure that highlights regions of the signatures most sensitive to mesh refinement. Results are also presented for the two atmospheric propagation test cases, which investigate the effects of atmospheric profiles on ground noise. Propagation is handled with the sBOOM code, which uses an augmented Burgers’ equation method, and ground noise metrics are compared. We investigate mesh convergence and its implications on noise sensitivity across the boom carpet.

Biography

Wade M. Spurlock is a Research Scientist/Engineer for Science & Technology Corp. in the Computational Aerosciences Branch in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division. His interests are in computational fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, and aircraft design. He earned a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Mississippi State University and a M.S. in Aeronautics & Astronautics from Stanford University. Prior to coming to NASA Ames Research Center, he worked at Lockheed Martin Space and on the Vahana eVTOL project at A^3 by Airbus.

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