Joby Aviation is developing a six propeller, all electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. The aircraft is designed to operate near high population areas such as residences and workplaces, so it is imperative that the acoustic emissions of the aircraft are minimized for community acceptance. The aircraft design process incorporated the usage of high-fidelity computational aeroacoustics methods. Acoustic flight tests of the Joby aircraft were conducted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as part of the Advanced Air Mobility National Campaign and confirmed the revolutionary low noise footprint. The measured noise levels were compared with high-fidelity computational aeroacoustics predictions for two steady, level flight conditions. The results provide insight into the noise sources of the aircraft in these flight conditions. Airframe noise was predicted to be dominant for both flight conditions in the A-weighted spectrum due to the low propeller loading. Modeling efforts were made to account for acoustic shielding and airframe broadband noise and resulted in an improvement in the predictions, although the true noise sources are to be confirmed with further investigation.

Joby Aviation is developing a six propeller, all electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft for the Urban Air Mobility mission. The two primary design goals of this aircraft are safety and low noise. The aircraft is designed for high density operations near residences and workplaces, so it is imperative that the acoustic emissions of the aircraft are minimized for community acceptance. After flight testing the initial full scale prototype aircraft, a redesign process was undertaken to further improve the propeller acoustics. This process included rapid composite manufacturing to enable experimental tests of intermediate designs. The propellers were initially designed using a low fidelity lifting line and prescribed wake design code. Design studies were made based off this initial design using the high fidelity Navier-Stokes solver OVERFLOW and FW-H solver PSU-WOPWOP. This process resulted in an increased solidity, reduced tip speed, and a swept anhedral blade tip. The final design was tested and shown to have a 3 dBA decreased OASPL at a hundred foot radius and 45 degrees below the propeller plane in hover when producing the same thrust as the previous propeller design. The newly designed blade has been flight tested on the Joby production prototype aircraft.

A method is presented that captures complex interactional aerodynamics between various aerodynamic components of eVTOL or other aircraft configurations. The fluid around the aircraft is modeled as a free Euler flow, where various aircraft components are acting as distributed force density sources within that flow. The method supports reconfigurable aircraft configurations without changes to the underlying mesh. The formulation allows for realtime simulation that can be used directly in conceptual design to evaluate controllability, accelerate controls development, and support system simulations. In non realtime simulations it can be used as a medium fidelity tool to capture interactional aerodynamic effects in more comprehensive aircraft simulations.