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. 2021 Jun 1;18(11):5940.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph18115940.

Drone Noise Emission Characteristics and Noise Effects on Humans-A Systematic Review

Beat Schäffer  1 , Reto Pieren  1 , Kurt Heutschi  1 , Jean Marc Wunderli  1 , Stefan Becker  2
Affiliations

Drone Noise Emission Characteristics and Noise Effects on Humans-A Systematic Review

Beat Schäffer et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

The number of operations of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), commonly referred to as "drones", has strongly increased in the past and is likely to further grow in the future. Therefore, drones are becoming a growing new source of environmental noise pollution, and annoyance reactions to drone noise are likely to occur in an increasing share of the population. To date, research on drone noise emission characteristics, and in particular also on health impacts, seems scarce, but systematic overviews on these topics are missing. The objective of this study was to establish a systematic literature review on drone noise emissions and noise effects on humans. The paper presents the methodology of the systematic reviews performed separately for noise emission and noise effects, assembles current literature, gives an overview on the state of knowledge, and identifies research gaps. Current literature suggests that drone noise is substantially more annoying than road traffic or aircraft noise due to special acoustic characteristics such as pure tones and high-frequency broadband noise. A range of open questions remains to be tackled by future studies.

Keywords: UAS; UAV; annoyance; drones; multicopter; noise effects; noise emission; perception.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
PRISMA flow diagram of the systematic review on drone noise emission characteristics.
Figure 2
Figure 2
PRISMA flow diagram of the systematic review on noise effects of drones.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Noise emission of multicopters (data points and regression models) in forward flight (a) and hover (b) as a function of take-off mass: Free-field emission values of multicopters as A-weighted sound pressure level at a distance of 1 m for a radiation angle of −30° as a function of the drone mass.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Vertical noise source directivity patterns of multicopters at different frequency bands (data: Heutschi, et al. [27]; Treichel and Körper [39]). The vertical line (“Omni”) indicates an omnidirectional radiation, i.e., monopole.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Narrowband spectrum of a hovering multicopter DJI Mavic 2 Pro measured in the laboratory [43].
Figure 6
Figure 6
Noise emission strengths in 1/3 octave bands of different multicopters operating at maximum power [43].
Figure 7
Figure 7
Illustration of the psychoacoustic sound pressure level difference (∆L): hypothetical exposure–response curve for annoyance as a function of sound pressure level of a drone and a reference sound source, and ∆L as the horizontal shift of the two curves.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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