The environmental noise pollution due to civilian aviation now constitutes the primary obstacle to a sustainable future for air transportation, the continuous growth (+5% every year) of which comes along with increased levels of societal and health concerns worldwide. This not only threatens the development of air travel (expected to double by 2040) but may also prevent the emergence of future airspace solutions (e.g. supersonic transportation). In particular, it has become critical to further mitigate the noise impact due to air traffic around airports of major cities – to begin with Hong Kong, which ranks 6th (resp. 1st) in the world for what concerns the yearly volume of passengers (resp. cargo) – pre-pandemic figures.

Since decades, air traffic noise mitigation was achieved by constantly reducing the aircraft noise at its source, for instance through the development of quieter engines and/or low-noise aircraft architectures. A more recent and very promising alternative is to mitigate the overall noise impact on the ground, for instance by optimizing the aircraft flightpaths (e.g., the so-called Continuous Descent Approach, which is now adopted by major airports, including Hong Kong International Airport, HKIA). Doing so, however, requires developing accurate prediction means (e.g. aircraft noise prediction software) and optimization tools (e.g. multidisciplinary optimization platform) that may allow modelling the entire set of aircraft operations around airports. These computational means must be validated against actual noise data coming from actual aircraft movements (take-off and climb, approach and landing). Whereas this primarily concerns the (objective) level of aircraft noise impact on the ground, it also encompasses more refined metrics pertaining to the (subjective) annoyance onto populations (e.g. psycho-acoustic).

For helping the on-going development of such an aircraft noise prediction and optimization platform by HKUST researchers (cf. Wu & Redonnet, Transportation Research Part D, vol 125, 2023), the UROP project will consist in developping a Community Noise simulator, to provide users with a first-hand experience of the noise annoyances incurred by realistic – yet simulated – aircraft operations. This action will be built upon a preliminary exploration conducted by the supervisor, in collaboration with HKSAR Environmental Protection Department. The work will consist in developing a Virtual Reality (VR) environment enabling any aircraft operation to be digitally replicated with its ground noise being faithfully synthetized in an audible, binaural fashion. Different from the pilot study (for which a commercial software was used), here, the simulator will be developed using existing open-source, research-oriented frameworks dedicated to VR synthetization, either aural or visual. This VR-based simulator will then be used to exploit already existing computational and/or experimental results, thereby offering any user an immersive experience; Once equipped with a VR headset, s/he will be able to evolve within a virtual yet realistic scenery whilst seeing the aircraft flying above and hearing their associated noise.

Successfully conducting this research action will imply overcoming various technical challenges. This will require the UROP participant(s) to acquire and master specific knowledge and skills, whether theoretical (noise physics) or practical (developing VR-based simulation tools). Besides, this research action will have to be conducted in close coordination with the HKUST researchers involved in this underlying effort of air traffic noise mitigation. On another hand, this research action shall provide the UROP participant(s) an exciting opportunity to taste the water of what R&D is all about, by tackling a challenging problem within an actual research framework.