Ever since the Wright Brothers' first powered flight in 1903, commercial aircraft have relied on liquid hydrocarbon fuels. However, the need for greenhouse gas emission reductions along with recent progress in battery technology for automobiles has generated strong interest in electric propulsion in aviation. This work provides a first-order assessment of the energy, economic, and environmental implications of all-electric aircraft. We show that batteries with significantly higher specific energy and lower cost, coupled with further reductions of costs and CO 2 intensity of electricity, are necessary for exploiting the full range of economic and environmental benefits provided by all-electric aircraft. A global fleet of all-electric aircraft serving all flights up to a 400-600 nmi (741-1,111 km) distance would demand an equivalent of 0.6-1.7% of worldwide electricity consumption in 2015. Whereas lifecycle CO 2 emissions of all-electric aircraft depend 2 on the power generation mix, all direct combustion emissions and thus direct air pollutants and direct non-CO 2 warming impacts would be eliminated.

This paper describes a systematic and comprehensive hot-wire investigation into the turbulent statistics of low-, moderate-and high-speed subsonic jets. Experiments were performed to obtain the one-point and two-point statistics of a single-stream, unheated jet turbulence field over a broad region of the jet plume. Results show that hot-wires can be used to measure both the one-point and two-point statistics of the high turbulence intensity, noise-producing regions of unheated, compressible, subsonic jets. For the two-point measurements, probe pairings are performed over the three orthogonal axes. Analysis of the experimental data reveals four main conclusions: (1) both the statistical and joint moments of the turbulence scale well with the local jet shear layer half-width; (2) a simple relationship exists between the statistics of the velocity fluctuations and the square of the velocity fluctuations; (3) a simple relationship exists between the longitudinal and transverse length-scales, and (4) a semi-empirical model has been developed to predict the cross-correlation coefficients, power spectral density, frequencydependent length-scales and coherence decay of the turbulent velocity field. From the second and third conclusions, it is shown that, in the locations near an eddy's centre of rotation (i.e. the midpoint of the jet shear layer), the turbulence statistics can be described as quasi-homogeneous and quasi-frozen. The joint statistical moments, therefore, can be inferred simply from single-point tests. These results will help to develop models for predicting jet mixing noise, highlighting the situations in which the simplifying assumptions are inadequate.

This paper reports an extensive near-and far-field analysis of the noise generated by an isothermal, subsonic, circular jet in the presence of a solid, flat plate shield. Far-field polar and azimuthal acoustic images are presented initially to characterize the interaction noise source. Near-field streamwise microphone phase analysis along the plate trailing edge reveals a deeper understanding of the link between the jet hydrodynamic field (both linear and non-linear regions) and the mechanisms behind interaction noise generation. Near-field point spectrum data have also been used successfully to validate Amiet's far-field trailing edge dipole prediction code for low-speed jet acoustic Mach numbers.

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.

In this paper we develop a novel ray solver for the time-harmonic linearized Euler equations used to predict high-frequency flow–acoustic interaction effects from point sources in subsonic mean jet flows. The solver incorporates solutions to three generic ray problems found in free-space flows: the multiplicity of rays at a receiver point, propagation of complex rays and unphysical divergences at caustics. We show that these respective problems can be overcome by an appropriate boundary value reformulation of the nonlinear ray equations, a bifurcation-theory-inspired complex continuation, and an appeal to the uniform functions of catastrophe theory. The effectiveness of the solver is demonstrated for sources embedded in isothermal parallel and spreading jets, with the fields generated containing a wide variety of caustic structures. Solutions are presented across a large range of receiver angles in the far field, both downstream, where evanescent complex rays generate the cone of silence, and upstream, where multiple real rays are organized about a newly observed cusp caustic. The stability of the caustics is verified for both jets by their persistence under parametric changes of the flow and source. We show the continuation of these caustics as surfaces into the near field is complicated due to a dense caustic network, featuring a chain of locally hyperbolic umbilic caustics, generated by the tangency of rays as they are channelled upstream within the jet.