Part 4/6:
For decades, wind tunnel testing has been the gold standard for studying and understanding fluid flow around aircraft prototypes. Engineers can test scaled-down models and observe how air moves over their surfaces, helping them refine designs to lessen the sonic boom's impact.
However, wind tunnel tests are time-consuming and costly. To overcome these limitations, advances in computational fluid dynamics (CFD)—a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical analysis and algorithms to simulate fluid flow—have revolutionized the field. CFD allows researchers to create detailed models of airflow around various aircraft shapes with high precision.