Assessment of in-cabin noise of wide-body aircrafts

Heow Pueh Lee; Sanjay Kumar; Saurabh Garg; Kian Meng Lim

doi:10.1016/j.apacoust.2022.108809

Assessment of in-cabin noise of wide-body aircrafts

Appl Acoust. 2022 Jun 15:194:108809. doi: 10.1016/j.apacoust.2022.108809. Epub 2022 May 6.

Authors

Heow Pueh Lee¹, Sanjay Kumar¹, Saurabh Garg¹, Kian Meng Lim¹

Affiliation

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, 9 Engineering Drive 1, Singapore 117575, Singapore.

Abstract

The aviation industry has seen dramatic growth over the decades till the recent disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, long-haul routes with a distance of more than 4000 km are common for major airlines worldwide. Therefore, aircraft cabin noise assessment is essential, especially in long-haul flights, for passenger and flight crew health wellness. In this paper, the cabin noise of five wide-body aircraft, namely Airbus A330-300ER, A350-900, A380-800, and Boeing B777-200ER and B787-900, was recorded using a calibrated in-house developed smartphone application. The sound pressure levels of in-cabin noise have been measured on two different decibel scales, namely, A-weighted [dB(A)] and C-weighted scales [dB(C)]. The sound pressure levels of Airbus A380-800 were lowest among selected models, while the in-cabin pressure level values of Airbus A350-900 were maximum. However, the difference in decibel levels between the aircraft is minimal as it is within 3 dB.

Keywords: Aircraft cabin noise; Low-frequency noise; Noise measurement; Wide-body aircraft.