Contribution
Evaluating the Ground Noise Footprint of Urban Air Mobility Vehicles
* Presenting author
Abstract:
The vision of making the aviation sector more sustainable is coupled with the concept of Urban Air Mobility (UAM), which implies the implementation of electrically driven aerial vehicles within urban areas. A key obstacle is thereby the potential of increased noise immissions for the public, as common UAM vehicle designs employ a multitude of distributed rotors causing increased aerodynamic interactions and elevated noise emissions. To draw first conclusions on this concern, numerical methods are employed for predicting such vehicles' noise footprint on the ground. In context with the Holistic Air Mobility Initiative Bavaria, the proposed paper presents and compares various flyover scenarios of a tilt-rotor air taxi configuration, focusing on assessing the informative value of commonly utilized noise measures. The study employs a pre-existing noise sphere dataset, strategically positioned over waypoints along each flight path to model and map the noise distribution across a microphone grid on the ground. This holistic approach provides a comprehensive view of how these factors influence the perceived noise impact of air taxis. Further, the comparison of multiple flyover events reveals critical patterns in ground noise propagation and questions the adequacy of standard noise measures for capturing the unique acoustic signature of air taxi operations.