Urban Air Mobility: Simulating the sounds of future cities

Simulating the sounds of future cities

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is changing transportation of people and cargo in our cities. Firstly, Unmanned Aerial Systems ‘UAS’ or drones are set to be commonplace for deliveries from our cities to remote areas and secondly, Urban Air Mobility aircraft ‘UAM’ or ‘flying taxis’ are being developed to transport passengers within cities. Both have the potential to be safer, with a lower carbon footprint, and act as a more sustainable alternative to helicopters and other aviation modes.  

Addressing the noise challenge

UAM aircraft’s overall noise level is likely to be lower than that of a helicopter, but the specific characteristic may be viewed as more disturbing or annoying. Arup collaborated with NASA in the development of the white paper “Urban Air Mobility Noise: Current Practice, 

Gaps, and Recommendations”, which identifies gaps in knowledge and gives recommendations about which areas of further research and development is needed to remove barriers to the AAM industry. Since then, Arup’s aviation and acoustics teams have been working to develop physics-based sound simulation modelling to understand the noise created by UAM and the impacts that they will have on people under their flight path. 

Normally our demonstrations would rely on sound recordings but as AAM vehicle recordings are unavailable, we have developed our own sound simulation methods and validated them against our own flyover test data.   

Over time, we have improved our simulations to use semi-analytical models so we can predict the sound of different vehicles including the propellor noise where much of the noise originates. 

“We have been building our relationship with NASA over many years and have combined our sound models and auralisation techniques with the NASA’s Auralisation Framework to demonstrate in SoundLab  the sound of the operation of these novel vehicles. By combining our in-house models with this NASA tool, we synthesize the acoustic features of specific vehicles to help manufacturers prototype or optimize their vehicles, based on the noise signature, as well as general noise levels: said Ana Luisa Maldonado, Senior Consultant, Arup. 

Through the use of sound demonstrations, people can experience flypasts and can judge themselves the impact these vehicles might have; either visually or sonically. 

Facilitating conversations

We are working with key stakeholders from governing bodies to policy makers and manufacturers, to use our UAM sound studies to produce designs that minimise noise impacts. By facilitating more informed discussions on the impact of AAM on society we can inform better discussions which will in turn help to secure better buy-in and public acceptance which will then lead to the successful implementation of this new technology.