Study of Key Noise Characteristics for a Personal Flight Vehicle
Open Access
- Author:
- Calibeo, Joseph Peter
- Area of Honors:
- Aerospace Engineering
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Kenneth Steven Brentner, Thesis Supervisor
Kenneth Steven Brentner, Thesis Honors Advisor
Jacob Willem Langelaan, Faculty Reader
Eric Norman Johnson, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- Helicopter
Coaxial
rotor
noise
WOPWOP
aeroacoustic
computation
GoFly
aerospace
personal flight vehicle
VTOL - Abstract:
- Humanity has waited a long time for the age of personal flight vehicles, as envisioned in the television show “The Jetsons.” In order to make this dream a reality, The Boeing Company is sponsoring the GoFly competition in order to promote the development of personal flight vehicles with emphasis on size, speed, and noise. Low operational noise is key to the acceptance of this new transportation technology. In order to evaluate noise, single and coaxial rotor configurations were created with a variety of parameters such as number of blades, lift coefficient, blade length, and tip speed. Acoustic pressure and noise for each rotor configuration were then calculated using the noise prediction code PSU-WOPWOP. The results of this parametric noise study were used to make a first-order estimate of the impact these design factors have on quiet flight for the proposed vehicles. It was hypothesized that rotor tip speed would have the largest effect on noise levels; but for the low tip speeds considered in this study it was later confirmed that decreased blade loading as a result of increased blade number was the first order design parameter that had the largest effect on noise. This was a result of lower loading per blade and spatially distributing the loading. Additionally, with the tradeoff of increased power for the same amount of thrust, coaxial rotor configurations proved to be quieter compared to their single rotor counterparts.