AZUR Supersonic Bizjet

                Our project is a supersonic business jet by the name of Azur. We are 5 third year (undergraduate level, BAC+3) engineering students from ESTACA, a French university specialized in transport engineering. This project was made in the course of our aeronautical architecture class.                 Everyone in our group was interested by the prospect of designing a supersonic business jet from scratch. The challenges associated with supersonic flight and designing an entire airplane seemed interesting. Choosing to design an aircraft type which doesn’t currently exists on the market meant that there wasn’t many examples to base our design on. Despite the lack of flying supersonic business jet several projects exist, such as the Aerion AS2 and the different proposal from the HISAC project. These projects were a great way to see how the engineers behind them handled certain technical challenges.                 During this semester we each spent about 160 hours on the project. With the help of regularly scheduled reunions as well as a nicely distributed workload we were able complete the project.             For more information about the project and its technical aspects, we invite you to consult the following website:

•             French version:  https://sway.office.com/Z8DX4OqHSLi8bkFQ?ref=Link&loc=play
•             English version:  https://sway.office.com/53BCVb0Sz7L1WOVN?ref=Link

 

• The project timeline:
  • First off, we defined the mission specifications for the aircraft. Number of passengers, range, cruising speed…
  • With the specifications set we were able to choose a basic architecture layout. Several projects were used as an inspiration for Azur such as the HISAC project contenders, the Aerion AS2 and the Spike S-512.
  • Once we had an estimated size for the aircraft, we thought out the cabin layout.
  • Our team now set out to balance the centre of mass and the centre of lift. The size and locations of the fuel tanks were critical to the plane balance. As such the fuel tanks were constantly changing throughout the whole balancing process. Balancing Azur was made using an Excel spreadsheet which recalculated both the centre of lift and the centre of gravity with every change in the aircraft dimension.
  • With the aircraft dimension fixed by the balancing constraints and the shape requirement for supersonic flight we started working on the CATIA model. We used CATIA V5 Student Edition to render Azur. The landing gear was properly articulated to show off the retracting mechanism.
  • Throughout all those steps, preliminary calculations were made to try and improve the performance and reduce the fuel consumption of our aircraft. The feedback from our aeronautical architecture teacher was also a great help in this project process.