Toward inclusion of atmospheric effects in the aircraft community noise predictions

This paper presents an atmospheric propagation model, based on ray acoustics, that accounts for realistic weather conditions in the evaluation of the noise footprint of an aircraft. Noise sources, obtained using the Ffowcs Williams and Hawkings acoustic analogy applied to scale-resolved flow simulation data, are stored on a hemisphere surrounding the vehicle. These noise sources are propagated using a propagation model that takes into account the vertical variability of air temperature and wind velocity. The electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, presented by Casalino, van der Velden, and Romani [(2019). in Proceedings of the AIAA Scitech 2019 Forum, January 7-11, San Diego, CA, pp. 1834-1851], is used as a case study; noise footprints, obtained considering various vertically varying temperature and wind velocity distributions, are compared. It is shown that weather conditions in the acoustic wave propagation can contribute to mismatch up to 4 dBA in the illuminated zone and a significant drop in the refractive shadow zone caused by the vertical air temperature and wind velocity gradients. This work constitutes the first accomplishment in including realistic atmospheric effects in aircraft community noise prediction based on scale-resolved flow simulations.