Estimates of residential floor vibration induced by sonic booms

Abstract

Future civil supersonic aircraft are expected to produce sonic boom noise within overflown communities that is substantially quieter than previous supersonic aircraft, which may allow regulators to replace the current prohibition on civil supersonic flight with a noise-based certification standard. In support of standards development, NASA has used an indoor simulation laboratory to investigate people’s reaction to combinations of transmitted sonic boom signatures and related floor vibration levels. Given the limited extent of experimental data, numerical models were used to estimate the expected range in floor vibration level that people may experience within a large assortment of houses for various low-amplitude sonic booms from different aircraft. This presentation will discuss the predictive models, compare predicted floor vibration to measurements from field experiments in similar houses, and document the range of predicted floor vibration that informed a recent psycho-acoustic laboratory study. The analyses of subjective annoyance from this laboratory study are discussed in a companion presentation (Rathsam and Klos).