September 3, 2015

A Silent Supersonic Jet?

Commercial travel on supersonic jets never took off because of the sonic boom these aircraft make as they rip through the atmosphere. But NASA's success visualizing the shock waves could lead to advances in jet design that make these ultra-fast aircraft quieter and ultimately commercially viable.

By Kalliopi Monoyios

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Last week, NASA announced that they had successfully imaged the shock waves from a supersonic jet using a 150-year old photography technique from Germany. From their press release:

"This schlieren image dramatically displays the shock wave of a supersonic jet flying over the Mojave Desert. Researchers used NASA-developed image processing software to remove the desert background, then combined and averaged multiple frames to produce a clear picture of the shock waves."

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This is the first time this technique has been used successfully outside of the tightly controlled conditions in wind tunnels, more accurately reflecting real atmosphere conditions where things like humidity and temperature gradients come into play. Since current regulations prohibit the creation of sonic booms over populated areas, the hope is that information gleaned from these images can help engineers mitigate the noise created by our fastest aircraft, ultimately making them commercially viable.

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