Initial Investigation into the Psychoacoustic Properties of Small Unmanned Aerial System Noise

Christian, Andrew; Cabell, Randolph H.

doi:10.2514/6.2017-4051

Cited by 89 publications

(70 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…LAeq is approximately linear in the sound level range between 50 dBA and 75 dBA, the difference between two curves at the 65 dBA reach about 2 units, yielding a difference of 6 dB equivalent. This suggests that the participants' responses on perceived annoyance are highly influenced by acoustics factors, other than sound level, particularly characteristic of small quadcopter noise (Cabell et al, 2016;Christian and Cabell, 2017;Torija et al, 2019b;Zawodny et al, 2016), or non-acoustics factors such as visual scene (Jiang and Kang, 2016;Jiang and Kang, 2017;Schäffer et al, 2019;Szychowska et al, 2018) and expectation (Bruce and Davies, 2014;Perez-Martinez et al, 2018). Fig.…”

Section: Relationship Between Laeq and Subjective Ratings For Urban Smentioning

confidence: 98%

Effects of a hovering unmanned aerial vehicle on urban soundscapes perception

Torija

Self

2020

Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment

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Several industry leaders and governmental agencies are currently investigating the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or 'drones' as commonly known, for an ever-growing number of applications from blue light services to parcel delivery. For the specific case of the delivery sector, drones can alleviate road space usage and also lead to reductions in CO2 and air pollution emissions, compared to traditional diesel-powered vehicles. However, due to their unconventional acoustic characteristics and operational manoeuvres, it is uncertain how communities will respond to drone operations. Noise has been suggested as a major barrier to public acceptance of drone operations in urban areas. In this paper, a series of audio-visual scenarios were created to investigate the effects of drone noise on the reported loudness, annoyance and pleasantness of seven different types of urban soundscapes. In soundscapes highly impacted by road traffic noise, the presence of drone noise lead to small changes in the perceived loudness, annoyance and pleasantness. In soundscapes with reduced road traffic noise, the participants reported a significantly higher perceived loudness and annoyance and a lower pleasantness with the presence of the same drone noise. For instance, the reported annoyance increased from 2.3±0.8 (without drone noise) to 6.8±0.3 (with drone noise), in an 11-point scale (0-not at all, 10-extremely). Based on these results, the concentration of drone operations along flight paths through busy roads might aid in the mitigation of the overall community noise impact caused by drones.

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Section: Relationship Between Laeq and Subjective Ratings For Urban Smentioning

confidence: 98%

Effects of a hovering unmanned aerial vehicle on urban soundscapes perception

Torija

Self

2020

Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment

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“…It is shown in [9] that a quadrotor UAS weighing 2.1 Kg can produce an overall sound pressure level A-weighting (OASPLA) between 45 and 65 dBA when 35 to 5 meters away, respectively. According to a psychoacoustic study [10], these overall SPLs would cause the majority of people to be slightly to moderately annoyed. Similarly, it has been shown that drone noise can cause detrimental effects on various animals, a common occurrence due to agriculture and wildlife imagery tasks carried out by drones [3,11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of Rotor–Airframe Orientation on the Aerodynamic and Aeroacoustic Characteristics of Small Unmanned Aerial Systems

Wang

Henricks

Zhuang

et al. 2019

Drones

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With the rapid increase in the number of multi-rotor small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) in recent years and a plethora of possible applications, the aerodynamic and aeroacoustic characteristics of these vehicles become very important issues. Due to the limited research on the aerodynamic and aeroacoustic characteristics of sUAS which include an airframe or support arm, this paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the flow and acoustic features with the inclusion of said geometry. The influence of rotor orientation—either mounted above or below the airframe—was comprehensively studied through experimental and computational analyses. Detailed experimental investigations—including particle image velocimetry (PIV), pressure transducer readings, and acoustic measurements—were employed to assess the aerodynamic and acoustic characteristics of a rotor–airframe system used on typical multirotor sUAS. The results from the computational methodology were also compared to those from the experiment to assess accuracy and possible benefits.

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“…As shown by Cabell et al [52], the noise measured for four representative Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) was dominated by multiple tones at harmonics of the blade passage frequency (BPF). Christian and Cabell [53] found that EPNL is unable to account for the extra annoyance caused by UAS as compared to road vehicles, and suggested that a more sophisticated tonality method is needed for improving the assessment of UAS noise annoyance.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the assessment of subjective response to tonal content of contemporary aircraft noise

et al. 2019

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The Effective Perceived Noise Level (EPNL) is the primary metric used for assessing subjective response to aircraft noise. The EPNL comprises calculation of the Perceived Noise Level (in PNdB), and takes into account flyover duration and the presence of pure tones to arrive at an adjusted EPNL value. With the presence of a single significant tone, EPNL has been found to be reasonably effective for the assessment of aircraft noise annoyance. Several authors have, however, suggested that EPNL is not capable of quantifying the subjective response to aircraft noise that contains multiple complex tones. The noise source referred to as "Buzz-saw" noise is a typical example of complex tonal content in aircraft noise with an important effect on both cabin and community noise impact. This paper presents the results of a series of listening tests where a number of participants were exposed to samples of aircraft noise with six variants of aircraft engines, assumed representative of the contemporary twin engine aircraft fleet. On the basis of the findings of these listening tests, the Aures tonality method significantly outperforms the EPNL tone correction method when assessing the subjective response to aircraft noise during takeoff with the presence of multiple complex tones. The participants reported 'high pitch' as one of the least preferable aircraft noise characteristics, and consequently, the psychoacoustics metric Sharpness was found to be another important contributor to subjective response to the noise of two specific aircraft engine groups (out of the six considered). The limitations of Aures tonality are discussed, in particular for aircraft noise with both a series of complex tones spaced evenly across the frequency spectrum with relatively even sound levels and less subjectively dominant single frequency tones (compared to broadband noise). In line with these limitations, further work is proposed for more effective assessment of subjective response to aircraft noise containing significant tonal content in the form of numerous closely spaced or other complex tones.

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Initial Investigation into the Psychoacoustic Properties of Small Unmanned Aerial System Noise

Cited by 89 publications

References 10 publications

Effects of a hovering unmanned aerial vehicle on urban soundscapes perception

Effects of a hovering unmanned aerial vehicle on urban soundscapes perception

Impact of Rotor–Airframe Orientation on the Aerodynamic and Aeroacoustic Characteristics of Small Unmanned Aerial Systems

On the assessment of subjective response to tonal content of contemporary aircraft noise

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