PARTNER Project 8: Sonic boom mitigation

Current U.S. and international laws prohibit commercial supersonic flight over land due to the impact of conventional sonic boom noise. Aircraft manufacturers, however, now have modern computational fluid dynamics and optimization tools, unavailable when those laws were enacted, that will allow them to design and build aircraft with boom signatures that are substantially smoothed compared with traditional N-waves. One purpose of the FAA/NASA/Transport Canada PARTNER Center of Excellence Project 8 is to determine exactly which waveforms the public will hear if low-boom supersonic aircraft are put into service. Another purpose is to ascertain the acceptability of those waveforms. The project involves the following universities, government, and industry partners: Penn State, Purdue, Stanford, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing, Cessna, Gulfstream, Lockheed-Martin, and Wyle Laboratories. Some of the initial project work includes studies on the propagation of sonic booms through atmospheric turbulence, on the mutual reproducibility of three sonic boom simulators, and on the realism of those simulators as determined by expert listeners. The results of all the studies are intended to provide the FAA with new data to reassess current regulations.