News » Local News

New Design Could Stop Sonic Booms

By InnovationNewsDaily Staff

Credit: Institute of Fluid Science / Tohoku University

A supersonic biplane concept created by Kazuhiro Kusunose and colleagues at Tohoku University in Japan.

March 15, 2012 Updated Mar 15, 2012 at 4:34 PM PDT

(InnovationNewsDaily) Biplanes once ruled the skies in the pioneering days of aviation and World War I. Now the old aircraft design could make a comeback in the silent supersonic jets of tomorrow.

A newer version of the biplane could reach supersonic cruising speeds without causing ear-splitting sonic booms, according to computer simulations by MIT and Stanford University researchers. They built upon the design of German engineer Adolf Busemann, who originally envisioned triangular wings connected at their tips.

"The sonic boom is really the shock waves created by the supersonic airplanes, propagated to the ground," Wang says. "It's like hearing gunfire. It's so annoying that supersonic jets were not allowed to fly over land."

For more on this story click here!

To submit a comment on this article, your email address is required. We respect your privacy and your email will not be visible to others nor will it be added to any email lists.