Project Boom is a student-led project founded in the summer of 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. The group’s objective was to create the first remote-controlled aircraft to break the sound barrier. Project Boom is an international effort with around 200 students spread amongst about 20 different countries. Note that Project Boom is not the same as Boom Supersonic, a startup that is trying to re-introduce supersonic commercial flight.

I joined Project Boom in July 2020, and I participated in the aero and the CAD teams. My first contribution was working with one of the four prototype designs. I did some research on the various types of supersonic planforms such as classic delta wings and cranked arrow wings. Then I helped make the CAD model for the “Charlie” concept.

Later, I worked on helping optimize the design using the area rule principle. I worked closely with Sajan Patel and we developed a procedure to analyze the design’s adherence to the area rule. Sajan created a really cool macro in SolidWorks that extracts the cross-sections of the design at different stations and saves it to an Excel sheet. I made code in MATLAB that compared the areas to an optimized shape known as the Sears-Haack body. The code created a plot comparing the area rule analysis for these two shapes. It also outputted the first derivative of the plot and a recommended area change per station.

After this, my participation decreased as summer’s end approaches and different obligations manifested. Please feel free to check out the team’s website for the latest on the project.