Abstract
Air traffic is growing at a steady rate of 3% to 5% per year in most regions of the world, implying a doubling every 15–25 years. This requires major advances in aircraft noise reduction at airports, just not to increase the noise exposure due to the larger number of aircraft movements. In fact it can be expected, as a consequence of increased opposition to noise by near airport residents, that the overall noise exposure will have to be reduced, by bans, curfews, fines, and other means and limitations, unless significantly quieter aircraft operations are achieved. The ultimate solution is aircraft operations inaudible outside the airport perimeter, or noise levels below road traffic and other existing local noise sources. These substantial noise reductions cannot come at the expense of a degradation of cruise efficiency, that would affect not just economics and travel time, but would increase fuel consumption and emission of pollutants on a global scale. The paper reviews the: (i) current knowledge of the aircraft noise sources; (ii) the sound propagation in the atmosphere and ground effects that determine the noise annoyance of near-airport residents; (iii) the noise mitigation measures that can be applied to current and future aircraft; (iv) the prospects of evolutionary and novel aircraft designs towards quieter aircraft in the near term and eventually to operations inaudible outside the airport perimeter. The 20 figures and 1 diagram with their legends provide a visual summary of the review.
Highlights
The present paper attempts to make a concise but comprehensive review of the problem of aircraft noise near airports, organizing the contents in four chapters
The sound generation by open (Section 2.1) and ducted (Section 2.2) propulsors has been discussed using: (i) the first theory of aerodynamic sound [1–9], known as the Lighthill–Proudman theory, leading to the Ffowls–Williams–Hawkins (FWH) equation, that is most appropriate for moving bodies in a uniform stream, e.g., aircraft propeller, helicopter rotor and fan/compressor/turbine noise; (ii) the second theorem of aerodynamic noise [9,72–78] that is less widely known, and is most appropriate for sound sources convected in a flow, such as “entropy noise” in jets, vortex or blade-vortex interaction (BVI) noise of helicopters, and installation effects (Section 2.3.1) and aerodynamic noise (Section 2.3.2) that relate to jet noise and scattering (Section 2.3.3)
The noise emitted by an aircraft in flight differs from that received on the ground at an airport due to atmospheric effects and the possible influence of ground composition and nearby buildings (Section 3.1).The noise annoyance caused to the near airport resident depends on the objective physical outdoor-to-indoor sound transmission and on psycho-acoustic effects related to the situation at the time, be it sleep, work or leisure (Section 3.2)
Summary
The present paper attempts to make a concise but comprehensive review of the problem of aircraft noise near airports, organizing the contents in four chapters. The combination (a) of well and less known theories and (b) of recent work and its earlier background, is intended to give a broad view of the scientific basis of aeroacoustics, that is related to the current issues of low-noice airport operations (Section 3) and aircraft design (Section 4). The latter two issues involve other aspects beyond aeroacoustics, that are mentioned more briefly in passing, since the main aim is to link aeroacoustics as a physical science with the engineering and operational aspects of low-noise aircraft design
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