Dr Sergi Pallejà Cabré - University of Southampton

Research Fellowships 2024

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) sectors have experienced unprecedented growth from $2.9 billion worldwide in 2020 up to a predicted $28 billion by 2030. This has fuelled research and innovation in designing electrical propeller-based Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) vehicles. These have the potential to create a more connected society; reduce travel time and roadway congestion; and benefit the environment with zero carbon emissions. However, community noise is one of the main barriers to the acceptance of this technology. Low-noise designs are therefore urgently needed for the success of this technology and to enable its benefits to society.

Typical vertical take-off and landing vehicle architectures comprise nonconventional arrangements of the propulsion system and the airframe, often using multiple wing and propellor configurations that move between vertical and horizontal configurations. These have an entirely different acoustic signature from current aircraft. Despite many years of research into propeller noise for conventional aircraft, there is a lack of understanding of new interaction mechanisms now arising in UAM and AAM vehicles. One of the least understood sources is the interaction of turbulent wakes from propellors at the front of the vehicle with propellers and wings located behind as it changes from vertical take-off to forward flight. This issue is common across many architectures. Dr Sergi Pallejà Cabré’s Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship project at the University of Southampton combines experimental, analytical, and numerical work to understand and mitigate this noise generation mechanism.

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