A new computational framework for UAV quadrotor noise prediction

Noise emissions play an important role on the sustainability of aviation due to its negative impact on human health. Most research has been focused in rotorcraft and fixed-wing aircraft noise prediction, but emergent generations of aerial vehicles, in the form of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), present a new field of study. The prediction of UAV noise is a challenging new field of research, given the wide range of applications. This work presents a numerical framework for noise prediction, already validated for rotorcraft, applied to a quadrotor UAV. The framework is composed by in-house aerodynamics and acoustics tools, which take advantage of GPU programming to significantly accelerate the simulation. In order to obtain reliable experimental data, exhaustive experimental tests were performed in the controlled environment of an anechoic chamber. The present work describes the numerical and experimental framework for UAV quadrotor noise prediction and the correlation between the results.