Future Aircraft and the Future of Aircraft Noise

Abstract

In order to cope with increasing air traffic and the requirement to decrease the overall footprint of the aviation sector—making it more sustainably and acceptable for the whole society—drastic technology improvements are required beside all other measures. This includes also the development of novel aircraft configurations and associated technologies which are anticipated to bring significant improvements for fuel burn, gaseous and noise emissions compared to the current state and the current evolutionary development. Several research projects all over the world have been investigating specific technologies to address these goals individually, or novel—sometimes also called “disruptive” —aircraft concepts as a whole. The chapter provides a small glimpse on these activities—mainly from a point of view of recent European funded research activities like Horizon2020 projects ARTEM, PARSIFAL, and SENECA being by no-way complete or exhaustive. The focus of this collection is on noise implications of exemplary novel concepts as this is one of the most complicated and least addressed topics in the assessment of aircraft configurations in an early design stage. Beside the boundary layer ingestion concept, the design process for a blended wing body aircraft is described, a box-wing concept is presented and an outlook on emerging supersonic air transport is given.

A Review of Novel and Non-Conventional Propulsion Integrations for Next-Generation Aircraft

“…[85] points out that it is possible to introduce other potential drawbacks: first, the positioning of the engine makes it more difficult to be accessible for regular maintenance procedures, increasing the time and cost of these operations; the location of the engines at heights close to that of the fuselage could increase the noise perceived in the cabin, penalizing the comfort of passengers; overwing installation could require the propulsion assembly to be moved rearward, thus causing center of gravity shifts, resulting in the need to increase the wetted area of the tail; and structural integration could result in weight increases. For these reasons, additional non-conventional UHBR turbofan installations are also under investigation; airframe configurations differing from the traditional tube-and-wing, such as those described in [91][92][93], are studied with the aim of identifying potential ideal platforms for the installation of a UHBR turbofan.…”

Methodologies for designing, optimizing, and evaluating possible unconventional aircraft configurations for future civil aviation

“…For more details refer to the standards reported by Graham, Hall and Morales (2014). Airframe and engine noise also raise similar concerns, and discussions about novel solutions to aeroacoustic problems can be found in Casalino et al (2008), Filippone (2014) and Knobloch et al (2022). Most of these targets require a substantial commitment to research and development of new technologies, i.e., potential future benefits can be achieved if we move away from traditional concepts and introduce new technologies in many fields such as aerodynamics, materials, structures, engines, and systems.…”