The conceptual/preliminary design of superonic jet configurations requires multi-disciplinary analyses (MDAs) tools which are able to provide a level of flexibility that permits the exploration of large areas of the design space. High-fidelity analysis for each discipline is desired for credible results, however, corresponding computational cost can be prohibitively expensive often limiting the the ability to make drastic modifications to the aircraft configuration in question. Our work has progressed in this area, and we have introduced a truly hybrid, multi-fidelity approach in MDAs and demonstrated, in previous work, its application to the design optimization of low-boom supersonic business jet. In this paper we extend our multi-fidelity approach to the design procedure and present two-level design of a supersonic business jet configuration where we combine a conceptual low-fidelity optimization tool with a hierarchy of flow solvers of increasing fidelity and advanced adjoint-based Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) optimization approaches. In this work, we focus on the aerodynamic performance aspects alone: no attempt is made to reduce the acoustic signature. The results show that this particular combination of modeling and design techniques is quite effective for our design problem and the ones in general, and that highfidelity aerodynamic shape optimization techniques for complex configurations (such as the adjoint method) can be effectively used within the context of a truly multi-disciplinary design environment. Detailed configuration results of our optimizations are also presented.in the design and use relative inexpensive multi-disciplinary analyses (MDAs). Preliminary design tools incorporate higher levels of fidelity (particularly in the aerodynamics) but can be quite costly. Traditionally it has been sufficient to follow a sequential process by which a rough configuration is developed during the conceptual design phase and it is later refined using preliminary design tools. The key question that we are revisiting in this paper is whether this sequential conceptual/preliminary design process is adequate for supersonic aircraft when the participating disciplines are closely coupled or whether higher-fidelity tools need to been included early on to ensure that the outcome of the conceptual designs can be believable and used for further design work. In some senses, we are proposing to merge the first two phases of the design, conceptual and preliminary, into a single one while ensuring that both the solution accuracy and turnaround time are acceptable to the aircraft designer.There are, however, some fundamental problems in integrating conceptual and preliminary design tools.At the conceptual stage we have traditionally integrated a large number of disciplinary models of low-tomedium fidelity coupled into a single multi-disciplinary analysis. The range of variation in the design variables is typically set large enough to cover large areas of design space. The nature of the resulting design space is o...

This paper presents an adjoint method for the calculation of remote sensitivities in supersonic flow. The goal is to develop a set of discrete adjoint equations and their corresponding boundary conditions in order to quantify the influence of geometry modifications on the pressure distribution at an arbitrary location within the domain of interest. First, this paper presents the complete formulation and discretization of the discrete adjoint equations. The special treatment of the adjoint boundary condition to obtain remote sensitivities is also discussed. Secondly, we present results that demonstrate the application of the theory to a three-dimensional remote inverse design problem using a low sweep biconvex wing and a highly swept blunt leading edge wing. Lastly, we present results that establish the added benefit of using an objective function that contains the sum of the remote inverse and drag minimization cost functions.

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