A Novel Tool to Estimate the Impact – Beyond Acoustics – of Aircraft Noise on Airport Communities (original) (raw)
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ANIMA Noise Platform and ANIMA Methodology: One-Stop Shop for Aviation Noise Management
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When you think about aviation noise, you might imagine an airplane taking off. When you think about decreasing aviation noise, the first thing that usually comes up in one’s mind are the new silent plane engines. This makes perfect sense, but it does not fully grasp the issue of aviation noise. The ANIMA project is based on a holistic approach to aviation noise, as it focuses on non-acoustical factors as well. Annoyance, as perceived by local communities surrounding airports, also depends on non-acoustical factors, which can be situational (time of the day, day of the week, activity performed while exposed to noise) and personal (sensitivity to noise, attitudes, noise insulation).
Noise-related land-use restrictions are included in Brazilian regulations since the beginning of the 1980s. These restrictions are applied in areas subjected to aircraft noise levels higher than compatibility criterion defined by the responsible authorities. However, noise-related conflicts remain common not only in Brazilian airports, and there are reactions from communities located in areas considered compatible by the regulations. Additionally, the current metric for aircraft noise evaluation in Brazil (Ldn - Day-Night Average Sound Level) is not easily understood by the general public, which jeopardizes the communication between airports and the communities affected by the noise. Given this scenario, the objective of this work is to propose a new methodology for aircraft noise evaluation, based on the application of weights on the number of noise events, with the objective of providing a good correlation with perceived annoyance, together with an increased ease of understanding to people without technical knowledge on acoustics. To validate this methodology, a survey was realized at the surrounding areas of the São Paulo-Guarulhos International Airport (GRU), in Brazil, with the use of online forms and advertisements published in social networks. The 547 responses obtained were used to evaluate the annoyance level caused by aircraft noise on the communities living on the surroundings of this airport. The results show that the proposed Weighted Number Above (WNA) and Verbal Number-Above (VNA) metrics are similar to the Ldn in terms of correlation with the reported annoyance, and has the additional advantage of the improved ease of understanding. The analysis also show that the current aircraft noise compatibility criteria are associated with annoyance levels higher than the ones foreseen by the applicable requirements, which confirms the need to consider community engagement aspects on the land-use definitions around airports, and not only the subjective aspects of noise acceptability.
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This ANIMA Deliverable sets out to review available noise metrics and tools to help identify effective and ineffective practice with the aim of informing the development of a Best Practice portal designed to assist airports to make the best use of noise modelling tools and their outputs. The review acknowledges the growth in the range of noise indicators now in use, often developed in an attempt to address specific stakeholder requirements. Whilst on the one hand the enhanced capability to 'capture' different aspects of the noise environment, on the other the picture can be seen as overly complex and confusing. In an attempt to provide some structure to the noise information now available and the modelling tools used to arrive at many of these outputs Sections 3 and 4 of this Deliverable develop frameworks for their categorisation. The Deliverable concludes that it is impossible to define best practice noise metrics on the basis of evidence from systematic assessments. Thus,...
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Aviation noise remains a key barrier to the sustainable growth of commercial aviation. The advent of emerging technologies, such as urban air mobility, and the renewed interest in commercial supersonic transport aircraft, has only further raised concerns over the resultant community noise exposure. The foundation of any noise mitigation effort is the ability to accurately model noise metrics over a wide range of scenarios. Aviation noise is influenced by a wide variety of factors, including aircraft type, payload weight, thrust settings, airport elevation, ambient weather, and flight trajectory. Traditional noise modeling paradigms rely on physics-based and empirical calculations, which are computationally expensive. Attempts at speeding up the computations with alternate models could deliver on speed or accuracy, but not both. Recent research has indicated that model order reduction techniques hold promise for transforming and greatly reducing the number of quantities that need to ...
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The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly changed workplace management. Most workplaces have adopted the work-from-home policy to minimize the risk of community spread. Consequently, housing estates remain largely occupied during office hours. Since some housing estates are situated in the vicinity of an airport, noise pollution resulted from the takeoff and landing of aircraft is now more noticed by residents, causing annoyance. This problem would be most acute for those located directly under the flight path. Before the pandemic, such aircraft operations had lower effect on the residents because most of them were not at home but at workplaces. Evidently, it is timely that more emphasis should now be placed during urban planning to predict and minimize aircraft noise in the built environment. This article first defines the aircraft noise metrics commonly used to assess environmental impact. Preceded by an overview of how aircraft noise affects the built environment, this article reviews how various aircraft noise prediction models have been used in urban planning. Lastly, this article reviews how aircraft noise can be managed for better acoustic comfort of the residents. Anticipating the adoption of hybrid work arrangement moving forward, this article aims to provide urban planning professionals with an avenue to understand how aircraft noise can negatively affect the built environment, which, in turn, justify why prediction and management of aircraft noise should be emphasized from the outset of urban planning.
Auralisation for Airport Noise Impact Assessments : Measurements and Applications
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Recent projects at local and overseas airports have highlighted some of the benefits and challenges in the use of auralisation as a tool for communicating the expected noise impacts from new airport or airport expansion projects. Opportunities for future development are also presented, including the use of signal processing to simulate changes to flight paths, changed meteorological conditions, or the changed noise emission characteristics of potential future aircraft. These projects also provide a useful body of data to investigate the application of the predicted noise levels from AS2021 in practice. The measurements suggest that AS2021 is broadly accurate in predicting noise levels from operation of Australian airports under typical flight conditions, but also highlight operational practices which may significantly increase the actual noise levels compared to the predicted noise levels that are based on idealised flight profiles.
Human response to simulated airport noise scenarios in home-like environments
Applied Acoustics, 2015
This research is part of a FP7 project supported by the European Commission called ''Community oriented solutions to minimize aircraft noise annoyance'' (COSMA). The present paper focuses on the development and the application of a methodology for the assessment of changes in airport noise exposure in homelike environments, particularly the design of sound scenarios and of experiments. Two airport noise changes are assessed and compared to a reference scenario: a halving of the number of aircraft, and an improvement in aircraft sound quality. For that purpose, sound perception, annoyance and activity disturbance as well as performances to cognitive tasks (Stroop and Word list Memory) are considered in the experiments involving 142 participants in 3 laboratories. Despite a similar L Aeq , overall annoyance significantly decreases when reducing the number of aircraft, which reinforces the interest in a noise event index (NNE-NA) in addition to energetic noise indices for regulatory purposes. Results to a change in aircraft sound quality are largely inconclusive. Further work should address the human response to future airport noise scenarios based on new aircraft designs, including innovative concepts.