Psychoacoustic analysis of contra-rotating propeller noise for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Torija Martinez, AJ ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5915-3736, Paruchuri, C and Zhengguang, L 2021, 'Psychoacoustic analysis of contra-rotating propeller noise for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles' , The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA), 149 (2) , pp. 835-846.

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Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies are rapidly advancing due to the unlimited number of applications from parcel delivery to people transportation. As the UAV market expands, community noise impact will become a significant problem for public acceptance. Compact drone architectures based on contra-rotating propellers bring significant benefits in terms of aerodynamic performance and redundancy to ensure vehicle control in case of component failure. However, contra-rotating propellers are severely noisy if not designed appropriately. In the framework of a perceptioninfluenced design approach, this paper investigates the optimal rotor spacing distance configuration to minimise noise annoyance. On the basis of a series of psychoacoustic metrics (i.e. loudness, fluctuation strength, roughness, sharpness and tonality) and psychoacoustic annoyance models, the optimal rotor axial separation distance (expressed as a function of propeller blade diameter) is at a range of 0.2 to 0.4. This paper also discusses the performance of currently available psychoacoustic models to predict propeller noise annoyance, and defines further work to develop a psychoacoustic annoyance model optimised for rotating systems.

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