Psychoacustic Analysis of Multiple UAM Vehicles in an Urban Area

Recently, Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has been attracting attention as a solution of 3D utilization of urban environments, and its market is rapidly growing. However, one of the major challenges that must be overcome for the commercialization of UAM is environmental noise issues. Many previous researchers have analyzed the public acceptance of UAM noise from psychoacoustic perspective, focusing on single events. But if UAM is commercialized, it would be essential to consider noise from multiple events. However, in reality, measuring UAM noise generated by multiple vehicles and in urban environments remains significant challenges. To overcome these challenges, this study utilized an environmental noise prediction method based on a Noise Hemisphere Database (NHD) to auralize the noise from multiple UAM vehicles flying in urban areas. The NHD was constructed using noise measurement data obtained during flight tests at Korea's K-UAM Grand Challenge. This NHD was used to simulate noise propagation in Korean urban areas and predict the time-domain data for the noise in these area. Subsequently, the predicted time-domain data were analyzed using psychoacoustic metrics, and compared with results from single-event studies.