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

Beat Schäffer, Reto Pieren, Kurt Heutschi, Jean Marc Wunderli and Stefan Becker
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Beat Schäffer: Empa, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, 8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland
Reto Pieren: Empa, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, 8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland
Kurt Heutschi: Empa, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, 8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland
Jean Marc Wunderli: Empa, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, 8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland
Stefan Becker: BeSB GmbH Berlin Schalltechnisches Büro, 12203 Berlin, Germany

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 11, 1-27

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: drones; UAV; UAS; multicopter; noise emission; noise effects; annoyance; perception (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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