Contrail aging simulation of a supersonic aircraft

Over the last decades, the increasing globalisation and the associated need for substantially shortened travel times has led to public and privately-funded development of supersonic aircraft. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) needs to define standards for the advent of this new generation of supersonic aviation. The SENECA project (“noiSe and EmissioNs of supErsoniC Aircraft”) aims at developing supersonic aircrafts, investigating the impact of specifical supersonic engine technologies on the aircraft performance and noise, providing aircraft fuel burn, emitted CO2 data and engine emission indices for NOx, CO, HC, SOx and soot and quantifying a range of climate impacts of supersonic aviation.

In the context of this project, the ONERA objectives are to model and characterize the contrails due to supersonic aircraft during cruise and to provide data to climatologists to calculate their global impact.

In this study, a focus is made on the vortex phase of the contrail aging modelled with the CEDRE software from ONERA. The vortex phase strongly depends on both the aircraft geometry and the atmospheric conditions. So, first RANS simulations using mesh adaptation were performed to obtain an aerodynamical field used to initialize the vortex phase [1]. 

From the RANS field, a slice far from the aircraft is extracted, extruded and interpolated on a 3D mesh whose longitudinal dimension corresponds to the Crow wave length. Jet and atmospheric fluctuations are added to trigger the Crow instability, and the stratification of the atmosphere is also modelled corresponding to the lower stratosphere where the aircraft is flying in cruise regime. After those steps, a LES simulation is performed to simulate the contrail aging.

 

[1] M. Muller and E. Terrenoire, Near-field mesh adaptation for contrail modeling of a supersonic aircraft, 3AF International Conference on Applied Aerodynamics, 29-31 March 2023, Bordeaux, France