British SAX-40 silent passenger aircraft concept

[hesham]

Hi,

the Cambridge-MIT institute design the SAX-40,a new silent
passenger aircraft,it has a blended wing.
http://www.techfresh.net/gadgets/misc-gadgets/sax-40-radically-shaped-plane-is-completely-silent/

 

[avatar]

obviously the X-48 comes to mind . But what are the key differences apart from the extra engine?
does this mean that the X-48 morphs back into a potential civilian airliner?

 

[Aeroengineer1]

This is part of a design study that is attempting to provide solutions for the "ever increasing" problem of noise "pollution". And yes I am being a bit sarcastic. The things that are involved here are things like optimizing engine placement not for performance, but for noise reduction. The leading and trailing edge flaps are not installed. Gear placement to avoid gear noise. I have read a few of the proposals, and I think that it should be emphasized that this is an academic study. It has yet to provide any real solutions to noise. It is taking relatively off the shelf ideas (with exception to the blended wing body) and trying to make an airliner work. From what I have read, economics has not played much of a role in the study. The reason that a BWB was used was due to the fact that it offered a sufficiently slow stall speed to operate without flaps. There was talk of using differing engine configurations to reduce different types of noise. Despite all of this, in my opinion, I believe that little will come of this study, and will once again show how academia tends to be out of touch with real world solutions.

Adam

 

[hesham]

Hi,

three variants.
http://web.mit.edu/hileman/www/Research/AIAA-2007-453.pdf

 

[mboeller]

more:

http://silentaircraft.org/


lot's of papers and presentations:

http://silentaircraft.org/downloads/