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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Torenbeek, Egbert, author.
Title: Essentials of supersonic commercial aircraft conceptual design /
Egbert Torenbeek, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.
Description: First edition. | Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2020.
| Series: Aerospace series | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019053571 (print) | LCCN 2019053572 (ebook) | ISBN
9781119667001 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119667032 (adobe pdf) | ISBN
9781119667049 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Supersonic transport planes--Design and construction.
Classification: LCC TL685.7 .T67 2020 (print) | LCC TL685.7 (ebook) | DDC
629.133/349--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053571
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053572
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Images: Supersonic plane © JimboMcKimbo/Shutterstock, The nose of the concord © Kenneth Summers/Shutterstock
This book is dedicated to my wife Nel Torenbeek-Volker with sincere thanks for her patience and stimulus during more than six years of hard work.
Foreword
Egbert Torenbeek's book on commercial supersonic aircraft design is timely, exactly 50 years after the first flight of the Concorde in 1969. It performed scheduled flights for 27 years and was able to operate with a profit because the aircraft's attractiveness was able to sustain a high ticket price. As such, the Concorde is the reference aircraft in Torenbeek's book, which starts with a chapter on Concorde's development and service. Torenbeek believes that “a new generation of supersonic passenger aircraft could have a commercial future a decade from now”. From this the author takes his motivation. He writes for a potential engineering team producing a conceptual design for a supersonic airliner. For his wider readership Torenbeek digests the best of the available literature and puts it together in a concise form. He draws his own books and papers on aircraft design and quotes authors that were on the forefront of supersonic aerodynamics: L. Prandtl, J. Ackeret, M.M. Munk, T. Von Kármán, A. Busemann, D. Küchemann, R.T. Jones and J.D. Anderson Jr. Moreover, some knowledge from the ESDU Data Sheets is used. Although many books are available about supersonic aerodynamics and supersonic design, Torenbeek puts all this together and writes about supersonic commercial aircraft design. In Chapter 8 about aerodynamic efficiency of supersonic cruise vehicle configurations, the pros and cons of configurations are compared, in particular the aft tail, foreplane and tailles designs. Clearly, the book has an aerodynamic focus as the aircraft cruise speed is supersonic, but the aerodynamic aspects are always discussed from a design perspective. This is especially true for Chapter 3 about weight sensitivity and energy efficiency, where Torenbeek starts this item with the first law of aircraft design, which states that the sum of the payload fraction, the empty weight fraction and the fuel fraction is equal to one. This equation also shows that not every design problem will have a solution if technology parameters for lightweight design and/or fuel weight are suitable. In the case of the Concorde, the maximum payload is only 6%, its empty weight fraction is 44%, and the relative fuel mass fraction is 50%. This is not a favorable comparison with the relative 25% for subsonic short‐range passenger aircraft and 10% for subsonic long‐range aircraft.
In Chapter 4 Torenbeek writes: during the development of the Concorde, devoted proponents suggested that the fuel efficiency at supersonic speed is not very different from the fuel efficiency at subsonic speed, arguing that that the deterioration of the deterioration of L/D at supersonic speed caused by supersonic wave drag is compensated by the high Mach number. Here the proponents used the term ML/D as the factor determining the fuel efficiency. Torenbeek points out that this is not correct since the total effects should be determined by the Breguet range equation, specifying that the range is proportional to ML/D divided by the specific fuel consumption TSFC of the installed engines, which is considerably higher at supersonic speed compared to subsonic speed. The author celebrated this year his 80th birthday and this foreword would be incomplete without looking back at his achievements. Egbert Torenbeek studied at the Delft University and graduated with a degree in aeronautical engineering. In 1961 he took the Guided Missiles Course at the College of Aeronautics in Cranfield (UK) which was followed by his military service in the Dutch Air Force from 1962 to 1963. He supervised a teaching course in the TU Delft to start working under Hans Wittenberg, professor of aircraft design. Torenbeek supervised a teaching course and concluded that there existed no up‐to‐date handbook on aircraft design. So, he collected information that had been published up to 1970, when passenger airplanes such as the DC‐8, the Boeing 707 and the Lockheed Tristar were already operational and Concorde had made its first flight. After about six years of work the book Synthesis of Subsonic Aircraft Design was published by the Delft University Press in 1982 and is presently distributed by Springer. After a sabbatical period of nine months in 1977 at Lockheed Georgia (USA), Torenbeek became full professor in 1980. In 1993 he had the leadership of the EXTRA 400 conceptual design, which was made with
