Overview
The COSMA project concerns the development of engineering criteria for aircraft design and operations in order to reduce the annoyance within airport communities due to aircraft exterior noise. Currently such criteria do not exist since aircraft noise engineering has historically focused on achieving ever lower noise levels for individual events and at close distance to the runway.
The objectives of COSMA are:
- improve the understanding of noise annoyance effects due to aircraft in the airport surrounding community through field studies and dedicated psychometric testing - use these findings in setting up optimised aircraft noise shapes;
- develop techniques for a realistic synthesis aircraft noise around airports;
- validate the optimised aircraft noise shapes and their associated engineering guidelines - put in place an efficient knowledge management for design practices and scientific information on aircraft exterior noise annoyance effects.
Through a comprehensive work plan, COSMA will ensure optimum exploitation of the scientific research results by reducing noise annoyance at source (whether by technological or operational means) through an improved understanding of the effects of aircraft noise in the airport surrounding community.
Under the technical guidance of industry experts, COSMA will integrate contributions from research organisations and SMEs, bringing together the multi-disciplinary background that is required for achieving the project objectives.
COSMA involves 21 partners from 9 different countries: Germany, France, UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Belgium, Portugal and Hungary.
Funding
Results
Interim results/ Achievements so far:
- Identification and Validation of operational and airports scenarios to be covered by laboratory testing.
- Aircraft and Powerplant Definitions aimed at the scenarios.
- Literature studies and associated recommendations for moderator variables.
- Public Website operational.
- First version of the long-term predictor based on the Frankfurt Study has been set up. Results show a mean prediction error below 10%. Based on parts of the conclusion, recommendation for annoyance examination field studies has been formulated.
- Best candidates as advanced aircraft sound quality descriptors have been identified.
- The first set of preliminary sequence sounds are currently been produced using recordings and target sounds generated in SEFA. To do this, an aircraft substitution table has been produced to match the operating fleet with the data available in the SEFA database. These preliminary sequences will be used only for the WP2 pre-tests.
- A specific computer tool to easily generate the desired sequence from a set of available single-event sounds has been produced and released to the consortium. The tool is designed to easily generate the sound files, the peaks profiles, and the sound level profiles using only public domain software.
- Low-noise optimised procedure and the associated sound spectra at the observation points have been produced, and provided to WP3 (Sound Engineering) partners for sound files synthesis. The resulting sound files will be the basis for the generation of the Scenario 3 sequences.
- The optimisation algorithm to be used for scenarios S4 and S5 has been defined.
Strategy targets
2. Innovating for the future; technology and behaviour.
Readiness
The final results of the project have yet to be presented.