Principal Investigator Zoltan Spakovszky
Reducing the environmental impact of air travel is a major impetus to current research in aeronautics. A potential configuration that could enable step changes in fuel consumption, noise and emissions is a hybrid wing-body aircraft where a lifting fuselage is blended with the wings. Building on previous work from the Silent Aircraft Initiative, this project aims to develop a set of advanced predictive methods that will enable the design of a hybrid wing-body aircraft to meet NASA’s N+2 goals: (i) 25% less fuel burn, (ii) 80% less emissions, and (iii) 52 dB less noise compared to current aircrafts in service. MIT, in collaboration with Boeing, NASA, and UC Irvine, is defining the aircraft configuration and propulsion system to meet such goals.
One approach reducing propulsion system noise is to mount the engines above the airframe, utilizing the large planform area to shield the noise generated by the turbomachinery. A fast algorithm of medium-fidelity was developed based on Kirchoff’s diffraction theory to compute the shielding effect of the airframe using directivity compact sources. The method includes flight effects and is applicable to any kind of aircraft configuration.
The method is being further developed to improve the attenuation predictions by taking into account the geometry of the airframe and propagating the diffracted noise accordingly.