Noise Research Effort for Advanced Supersonic Transport Engine: A European Perspective

The future supersonic civil aircraft should be economically viable and environmentally friendly. It will be operated from existing international airports and therefore will have to satisfy the noise regulation required for the subsonic civil transport. This will further have to be constantly updated to suit the more recent noise regulations at the time. The design of the engine is such that the high jet velocities required for cruise operation are rather incompatible with low noise around airports. Consequently, in order to accommodate both, performance in cruise and low noise at take off, a substantial noise research effort has been dedicated since the 90's in Europe, the United States and Japan. Most of this research has focused on the propulsion system and more particularly the exhaust system, jet noise being a major problem in the design of quiet engines.