Mathematical Modelling for Wave Drag
Optimization and Design of High-Speed
Aircrafts
Can Citak, Serkan Ozgen and Gerhard Wilhelm Weber
Abstract Supersonic flight has been the subject of last half century. Both civil and
defence projects have been running to design an aircraft to fly faster than speed of
sound. Developing technology and increasing experience of design leads to faster,
fuel efficient, hence, ecological, long-ranged aircrafts. These vehicles make people
live easy by shortening travel time, perform missions with powerful defence aircrafts
and helping explore space. Aerodynamic design is the main argument of the high
speed aircrafts improvement. Having less supersonic drag force, which is greater
than the double of subsonic case for conventional aircraft, is the ultimate goal of the
aircraft designers at supersonic speed. In this chapter, an aerodynamic characteristics
of the entire configuration is optimized in order to reach this aim. Moreover, solver
algorithm is validated with computational fluid dynamics simulations for different
geometries at various speeds. The objective of this study is to develop a program
which optimizes wave drag coefficient of high speed aircrafts by numerical methods.
Keywords Supersonic flight · Wave drag · Optimization · Area rule
1 Wave Drag Definition
Designing an aircraft with the ability of flying faster than the speed of sound was the
purpose of most aircraft designers in the past decades in order to reduce travel time
and research space. Both aims require ultimate design configurations for definite
missions. Unlike the subsonic design, the supersonic region has struggles to deal
with in order to reach this aim. The major part of this problem is about the huge drag
C. Citak (B ) · S. Ozgen · G.W. Weber
METU, Ankara, Turkey
e-mail: ccitak@ae.metu.edu.tr
S. Ozgen
e-mail: sozgen@ae.metu.edu.tr
G.W. Weber
e-mail: gweber@metu.edu.tr
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
A.A. Pinto and D. Zilberman (eds.), Modeling, Dynamics, Optimization
and Bioeconomics II, Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics 195,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55236-1_7
109