(Un)manned aircraft design with minimum Acoustic Footprint Seminar

Beside meeting the civil noise certification requirements, the acoustic footprint is a key design parameter for large military (un)manned aircraft. Surveillance missions for example must be carried out without being acoustically detected on the ground. At the same time, Acoustic Fatigue issues may impose limitations on the structure, equipment and personnel. During the design phase, the final aircraft configuration is frozen after several design loops during which elements affecting the acoustic footprint like engine type and location may change. This presentation describes the acoustic footprint design process followed at Airbus Defence and Space from early development to the in-service compliance evidence to the Customer.

The talk also addresses the quest for balance between acoustic footprint requirements and the many other design requirements and constraints. At the early stages of the development, the analysis process must be fast enough to be able to follow design changes whilst providing realistic but not necessarily extremely accurate results. It must also be able to incorporate field data coming for example from other platforms. Before configuration freeze, the analysis process must be able to more accurately estimate the design robustness to minor component or configuration changes. At configuration freeze, the analysis process must be able to accurately predict the aircraft footprint for the foreseen mission profiles. Once field data is available, either from flight test or in-service operation, the analysis process must be able to include such data. This presentation describes the toolset used at Airbus Defence and Space during this process. Examples of acoustic analysis results during the various development stages and for different aircraft are shown.