US 7,581,697 B1Granted

Design methods and configurations for supersonic aircraft

AssigneeHawker Beechcraft Corporation

InventorsCorey Hagemeister, David C. Aronstein, Kurt L. Schueler

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Abstract

Methods for configuring aircraft that may be implemented to integrate aircraft sonic boom constraint requirements with the design process for a supersonic aircraft, for example, to reconcile a target sonic boom constraint with the internal layout and balance of the aircraft during the design phase. The disclosed methods may advantageously be employed in one embodiment to allow a sonic boom-constrained aircraft design configuration solution to be reached that incorporates a desired sonic boom signature with the requirements of an internal configuration layout. Resulting aircraft configurations may be usefully employed for achieving sonic boom suppression on any type of supersonic-capable aircraft, for example, a civil supersonic business aircraft.

Claims6

Dependent claims

A method of configuring a supersonic aircraft comprising the steps of:

(a) determining a desired distribution of equivalent area versus equivalent length which meets a sonic boom criterion;
(b) selecting a configuration of external airframe components and a distribution of body cross-sectional area versus equivalent length which together meet the desired distribution of equivalent area versus equivalent length;
(c) selecting an arrangement of internal components by actuating a processor of a computer system to specify the arrangement of two-dimensional representations of internal components having dimensions of cross-sectional area and length to represent placement of the components along the length of aircraft;
(d) determining if the selected arrangement fits the distribution of body cross-sectional area versus equivalent length;
and if not, repeating at least one of steps (b) and (c).

2 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.