Supersonic biplane design via adjoint method

In developing the next generation supersonic transport airplane, two major challenges must be resolved. The fuel efficiency must be significantly improved, and the sonic boom propagating to the ground must be dramatically reduced. Both of these objectives can be achieved by reducing the shockwaves formed in supersonic flight. The Busemann biplane is famous for using favorable shockwave interaction to achieve nearly shock-free supersonic flight at its design Mach number. Its performance at off-design Mach numbers, however, can be very poor.;This dissertation studies the performance of supersonic biplane airfoils at design and off-design conditions. The choked flow and flow-hysteresis phenomena of these biplanes are studied. These effects are due to finite thickness of the airfoils and non-uniqueness of the solution to the Euler equations, creating over an order of magnitude more wave drag than that predicted by supersonic thin airfoil theory. As a result, the off-design performance is the major barrier to the practical use of supersonic biplanes.;The main contribution of this work is to drastically improve the off-design performance of supersonic biplanes by using an adjoint based aerodynamic optimization technique. The Busemann biplane is used as the baseline design, and its shape is altered to achieve optimal wave drags in series of Mach numbers ranging from 1.1 to 1.7, during both acceleration and deceleration conditions. The optimized biplane airfoils dramatically reduces the effects of the choked flow and flow-hysteresis phenomena, while maintaining a certain degree of favorable shockwave interaction effects at the design Mach number. Compared to a diamond shaped single airfoil of the same total thickness, the wave drag of our optimized biplane is lower at almost all Mach numbers, and is significantly lower at the design Mach number. In addition, by performing a Navier-Stokes solution for the optimized airfoil, it is verified that the optimized biplane improves the total drag, including the wave drag and the viscous drag, compared to a single diamond airfoil.