Cabin Acoustics at the hearT of ECO-responsibility

For cabin acoustics, propeller-driven hybrid-electric aircraft pose a major challenge, as high tonal noise levels in the low frequency range are expected inside the cabin. Active noise control (ANC) measures offer the possibility of reducing the individual high tones in the noise spectrum.

Advances in avionic aircraft systems mean that in the future, IT platforms with open industry standards, transmission rates of more than 10 Gbit/s and higher computing power will be found on aircraft to provide communication, computing and storage resources. The open standards and higher performance allow different critical applications to run more easily on the same IT infrastructure and decouple software and hardware certification. ANC systems could therefore share resources with other electronic systems, eliminating a major cost driver of previous approaches.

This project will therefore investigate the integration of active noise mitigation measures into aircraft electronic systems, specifically distributing ANC algorithms to audio modules running Zephyr RTOS and single pair Ethernet. Furthermore, space-saving and high-performance acoustic actuators will be explored. In the project, therefore, the aviation-specific requirements are first developed together with the project partners AIRBUS and DLR. This is followed by model-based system design and implementation on prototype hardware. At the end of the project, the solutions will be tested in the Acoustic Flight LAB demonstrator at the ZAL TechCenter.