Vibro-Acoustic Research on a Full-Scale Aircraft Structure

Abstract

The new transport aircraft A400M is designed for worldwide military and humanitarian missions. It is a turbo-propeller aircraft able to fly high, fast and over long distances and to take off and land on short rough runways. Regarding interior noise and vibration harshness, the A400M meets the state-of-the-art requirements. A disused A400M pre-series fuselage is currently incorporated into a vibro-acoustic test environment. Airbus has made the 30 m long, 6 m wide and 13 ton heavy fuselage part available for research at Helmut-Schmidt-University of the Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg (HSU). The possibility to analyse the interdependency of acoustics and structure in a controlled laboratory environment on an entire fuselage of the most modern propeller-driven large transport aircraft is a worldwide novelty. The enhancement of passive and active noise reduction technologies for aircraft structures will be one of the potential research key aspects. Transporting the fuselage from the Airbus production site in Bremen to the HSU campus was a logistical master piece – whether by land, air or sea. This paper gives a brief overview of a few selected past and present aircraft interior acoustics research projects, describes the transport of the A400M fuselage to HSU, highlights the first steps in the design of the test rig and introduces a potential scenario for a vibro-acoustic test series taking advantage of this unique test environment.