Conceptual design methodology for commercial supersonic aircraft exploiting drop-in fuels

This thesis work to develop a useful tool for the preliminary design of a supersonic civil aircraft, fitting within the European project "MORE & LESS" ("MDO and REgulations for Low-boom and Environmentally Sustainable Supersonic Aviation"). As a matter of fact, subsonic aviation is undergoing rapid and deep developments to be more efficient, performant and, the most important, sustainable. On the other hand, travelling faster than the speed of sound appears necessary to connect people from around the world in an ever-faster way. In such a scenario this project, coordinated by Politecnico di Torino and funded by the European Union, poses the problem of reviewing the environmental impact of supersonic aviation. The preliminary high-level analysis is the first step, so the starting point is a database of existing aircrafts and a set of theories and equations, all merging in a tool implemented in MATLAB environment witch, subsequently, allows the user to enter all the inputs needed for calculations and provide intermediate results and graphical outputs. A general overview of what could be some of the most important parameters of the new aircraft is provided from a statistical analysis, whom outputs are needed to the convergence loop of the weight estimation. This step includes the mission profile definition and the fuel consumption estimation, and it is followed by the main geometry definition, the aerodynamical analysis, and by the normative verification in matter of take-off and landing requirements and thrust-to-weight ratio and wing surface requirements. In this way the user, at the end of the loop or after any intermediate step, can decide whether to save the obtained results and go on with the detail analysis, or reject them and start again with different inputs. The methodology is intentionally specific to Kerosene or Biofuel power because, as will be further discussed in the next section, the aeronautical industries are moving towards reserving liquid hydrogen power to the subsonic aviation, due to the considerable technical difficulties involved in handling liquid hydrogen on board. At the end the tool can also run an off-design analysis providing the user awareness of the impact of initial choices on high-level design: it will be mainly discussed the effect of the number of passengers, range and cruise Mach.