Multi-disciplinary, community-oriented design of low-noise aircraft: the COSMA project

Abstract

Abstract:The EC-funded project COSMA (Community Oriented Solutions to Minimize aircraft noise Annoyance, 7 th Framework Programme) started in June 2009 with an ambitious, twofold goal: improve the understanding of the annoyance induced by aircraft noise on the population and identify the engineering guidelines to establish appropriate design strategies and operational procedure to reduce these effects. The project was conceived within the context of the X-Noise Collaborative Network, a worldwide network of experts and institutions committed to the commercial aviation noise challenge. The COSMA objectives were addressed using a highly multi-disciplinary approach, integrating competences pertaining to psychoacoustics, sound engineering, and aeronautical engineering. The work of twenty-three research groups from nine European countries was structured in six, strongly interconnected work packages. Aim of the present paper is the review of this cross-disciplinary research from the point of view of the aircraft designer. The attention is focused on the Optimisation of Airport Noise Scenarios work package, where the aeronautical technology context was established in detail and where, eventually, the design criteria and operational recommendation were defined on the basis of the outcomes of the annoyance examination experimental campaign.

Hitting the ‘pause’ button: What does COVID-19 tell us about the future of heritage sounds?

“…Government regulation in place to minimise transportation sound is also a driver for the market to undertake technological advancements speci cally relating to lowering sound emissions, with research investigating low noise technologies from aircra [54], trains [55], ships [56] and at airports [57]. It is expected that a similar decrease of sound emanation is to occur with transportation sounds in the future.…”

Special Issue on Environmental noise aspects in EU funded projects

“…Umberto Iemma in "Multi-disciplinary, community-oriented design of low-noise aircraft: the COSMA project" [14] [15] investigated the rotorcraft noise abatement during the approach procedures. The proposed methodology takes into account the Pilot Acoustic Indicator (PAI), a new cockpit instrument based on both pre-calculated and measured acoustic data, which enables the pilots to perform quieter manoeuvres.…”

Sound-Quality-Based Decision Making in Multiobjective Optimisation of Operations for Sustainable Airport Scenarios

“…The work presented in this paper is different from traditional trajectory optimisations, and it can be considered as an evolution of the approach first introduced during the SEFA projects (Sound Engineering For Aircraft, FP6, 2004FP6, -2007) to assess the perceptive qualities of the noise produced by a civil aircraft, and subsequently evolved to an airport scenario (i.e., a prescribed sequence of takeoff and landing procedures) during COSMA (community noise solutions to minimise aircraft noise annoyance, FP7, 2009-2012 [17,18]). Here, the sound quality assessment is applied in the multiobjective context adopted in the ANIMA project (Aviation Noise Impact Management through Novel Approaches, H2020, 2017-2021, [1,19]) as a criterion to select the least annoying procedure from the Pareto set of a two-objective optimisation.…”

“…Since the Multi Objective Optimisation (MOP) solution is composed of a set of non-dominated points, the sound quality assessment is applied to select the optimal trajectories. The aircraft operations have been optimised within the in-house Multidisciplinary Conceptual Robust Design Optimisation (MCRDO) framework FRIDA (Framework for Innovative Design in Aeronautics [12,15,16,18,[20][21][22]). The two objectives to be minimised are the Sound Exposure Level (SEL) 60 dBA contour area and the amount of fuel burnt during the entire airport operation.…”

“…The two objectives to be minimised are the Sound Exposure Level (SEL) 60 dBA contour area and the amount of fuel burnt during the entire airport operation. The decision making criterion makes use of a third objective function, built based on the sound-quality assessment: the latter is formalised as the L p norm in the vector space defined by the difference between the noise produced by the aircraft and a weakly annoying target sound (the interested reader can find useful information on the target sound definition in [18]). It is worth highlighting that L p norms of different orders can be used to build objectives that focus on local and distributed differences: this behaviour has been investigated concerning benchmark problems [16], and it can be demonstrated that it can be exploited when the effect of tonal components is explicitly available.…”