25th Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, 3 - 8 September 2006, Hamburg, Germany
Paper ICAS 2006-1.4.1 INVITED:

NATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL SUPERSONIC TRANSPORT PROJECT

T. Ohnuki, K. Hirako, K. Sakata
JAXA, Japan

Keywords: Supersonic, Flight Experiment, UAV, CFD, Aerodynamic Design Technology

National Experimental Supersonic Transport (NEXST) Project was commenced in 1997 by National Aerospace Laboratory (NAL), which merged into Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in 2003. Development and flight experiment of scaled supersonic aircraft is a core of this project which aims at the establishment of the aerodynamic design technology using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method. The airplane configuration is designed using the inverse method. This method is developed by NAL and produces a wing shape to realize the given pressure distribution. The airplane is 11.5m long, 4.7m wide, and 2,000kg weight. It is a non-powered vehicle and launched with solid rocket booster. The flight experiment was conducted successfully in Woomera Test Range in South Australia and the results show that the flight data has a good agreement with the predicted characteristics.

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