Empa research project shows: Planes of the future will be less noisy

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Aircraft with “Blended Wing Body” (BWB) are seen as a hope for reducing environmental and noise pollution in air traffic, the Federal Institute for Materials Testing and Research (Empa) announced on Thursday.

Unlike today’s aircraft, which consist of a wing tube, in aircraft with the blended wing-fuselage concept, the fuselage is not a tube but flows smoothly into the wings. This reduces air resistance and therefore fuel consumption and noise.

Based on physical laws, Empa researchers created noise simulations of overflights of a BWB aircraft with 400 passengers. They relied on a BWB aircraft designed within the European research project “Artem” (Aircraft Noise Reduction Technologies and related Environmental Impact).

Measured from nine kilometers away, today’s airplanes reach noise levels of 90 decibels (dB) during takeoff. BWB jets reach almost 70 dB.

Empa said that to realistically capture how disturbing and stressful noise emissions are on people, the subjective perception of those affected must also be taken into account. To do this, researchers at Empa’s acoustics laboratory played flight simulations for 31 people aged 18 to 61.

After the experiment, subjects completed questionnaires in which they rated their subjective impressions on a scale from 0, “not at all bothered or bothered,” to 10, “extremely bothered or bothered.”

As the study published in the journal “Aerospace Science and Technology” showed, BWB aircraft were rated 3.5 to 4.3 points less destructive than conventional aircraft.

(SDA)

Source : Blick