Community Oriented Solutions to Minimise aircraft noise Annoyance

Kurzfassung

COSMA will help to improve the understanding of the effects of aircraft noise near airports, to develop engineering guidelines, methods implementing suitable design, operating practices aimed to minimise the noise annoyance, supported by a set of validated tools. An extensive literature study about annoyance around airports since 1980 was performed. A list of moderator variables that are affecting the annoyance around airports was established on the basis of this study. The power plant and aircraft definition was given, which is important for the further work in the technical work packages. Telephone and field studies are preparing part for the central annoyance studies in the project. More than 1.200 telephone interviews were performed to map the status quo of the current aircraft noise annoyance situation around 3 European airports. The field study will provide more detailed information about the current noise annoyance. An interactive Sound Synthesis Machine (SSM) was developed to improve the sound quality of a single aircraft fly-over. Subjects will be able to create their own preferred sounds for different aircraft using this tool. It consists of an on-line Sound Machine (SM) for interactive sound quality analysis and the Airport Noise Climate Synthesizer (ANCS), producing event sequences in real airport scenarios. Significant work was also carried out to improve source component and noise propagation models that are implemented in the ANCS tool. Further work was performed for developing an intelligent Data Reduction and Transformation (iDRT) module. Based on this reduced data a so-called “virtual listener” regression model was developed, predicting the annoyance. For long-term descriptors, a preliminary version of a neural network was developed. Finally, five different airport scenarios for investigation were defined, also the criteria for their optimisation. An interactive tool, to generate a sequence easily and of arbitrary length from the available data base, was written and is already available.