Making the aviation industry more environmentally friendly

The University of Salford is part of a European project looking at ways of helping the aviation industry to achieve environmental targets.

Running for the next two years, RefMap, involving 11 partners in eight European countries, is aimed at helping airlines make more eco-friendly decisions such as using optimal flight plans that minimise climate impact, air pollution and using sustainable aviation fuels.

By using environmental data, such as wind, noise, CO2, and non-CO2 emissions, RefMap’s analytics platform will help airlines, airports, and regulators make more eco-friendly decisions. This will lead to stricter evidence-based green policymaking in the aviation sector and the development of new aviation business models in line with the EU’s Green Agenda.

One of the ideas is for electrically powered smaller air vehicles (drones) to share the skies with more traditional aircraft.

RefMap’s UK partner, the University of Salford has completed the first of a series of experiments aimed at understanding the human response to drone noise in its world class acoustics facilities. The ultimate goal is to develop a model to predict drone noise annoyance and then to help come up with solutions to minimise the disruption the noise creates.

Dr Antonio Torija Martinez is leading the research at Salford. He said: “If we can find ways to make drones more usable and less disruptive then that will be a huge step to making them acceptable for wider use. That is what we are looking at Salford.”

Virtual Reality and spatial audio techniques will be implemented to simulate highly immersive scenarios of drone operations in a variety of environments. This will be used to unravel the complex audio-visual interactions in drone noise perception. The focus will be to define targets for public acceptance of drone noise. The team at Salford will also look at the impact of drone noise on wildlife.

Dr Torija Martinez added: “The focus is on investigating the connections between drone noise noticeability and annoyance for a number of different drone types, operating conditions and ambient background noise levels, and then use this to aid the trajectory optimisation of drones to reduce the impact on communities.”

The project, which will last three years, has received funding from the European Union’s HORIZON Research and Innovation Programme, and more specifically the European Commission’s CINEA – European Climate, Infrastructure, and Environment Executive Agency, under Grant Agreement number 101096698. Among the partners are the University of Birmingham and the Delft University of Technology.