Aircraft Noise Assessment—From Single Components to Large Scenarios

The strategic European paper “Flightpath 2050” claims dramatic reductions of noise for aviation transport scenarios in 2050: “...The perceived noise emission of flying aircraft is reduced by 65%. These are relative to the capabilities of typical new aircraft in 2000...”. There is a consensus among experts that these far reaching objectives cannot be accomplished by application of noise reduction technologies at the level of aircraft components only. Comparably drastic claims simultaneously expressed in Flightpath 2050 for carbon dioxide and NOX reduction underline the need for step changes in aircraft technologies and aircraft configurations. New aircraft concepts with entirely different propulsion concepts will emerge, including unconventional power supplies from renewable energy sources, ranging from electric over hybrid to synthetic fuels. Given this foreseen revolution in aircraft technology the question arises, how the noise impact of these new aircraft may be assessed. Within the present contribution, a multi-level, multi-fidelity approach is proposed which enables aircraft noise assessment. It is composed by coupling noise prediction methods at three different levels of detail. On the first level, high fidelity methods for predicting the aeroacoustic behavior of aircraft components (and installations) are required since in the early stages of the development of innovative noise reduction technology test data is not available. The results are transferred to the second level, where radiation patterns of entire conventional and future aircraft concepts are assembled and noise emissions for single aircraft are computed. In the third level, large scale scenarios with many aircraft are considered to accurately predict the noise exposure for receivers on the ground. It is shown that reasonable predictions of the ground noise exposure level may be obtained. Furthermore, even though simplifications and omissions are introduced, it is shown that the method is capable of transferring all relevant physical aspects through the levels.