Noise Assessment of Mulit-rotor Flying Vehicles

This paper highlights three on-going projects conducted at HKUST towards the development of a noise assessment platform for multi-rotor flying vehicles. The first project outlines the development of a test rig for assessing the aerodynamic and aeroacoustic performance of small-scale UAV propellers. Generic propellers were developed so that the importance of key design parameters may be determined systematically. Additionally, these generic propellers were made of metal to minimize any aeroelastic effects. The second project focuses on full-scale drone experiments that were conducted within a large anechoic chamber, which overcomes any environmental or meteorological factor that may otherwise be present in outdoor field testing. The experiment consisted of microphone array measurements and simultaneous position tracking, which provided a complete characterization of drone noise under realistic flight conditions. The final project focuses on the development of an acoustic ray tracing code, to predict the noise impact of a hovering drone in complex urban environments. The noise source applied to this code was developed from the anechoic chamber tests © Proceedings of the 26th International Congress on Sound and Vibration, ICSV 2019. All rights reserved.