The Cabin Comfort and Environment Research (CCER) facility is a flexible cabin laboratory at National Research Council of Canada (NRC), which was built to investigate the effects of integrating new cabin technology and designs on passenger comfort and travel experience. The cabin sound field reproduction system is one of the capabilities being developed within the CCER in order to accurately reproduce the spatial distribution of the sound field environment within an aircraft cabin that passengers experience during flight. Sound environment reproduction in aircraft cabin mock-up can be used to demonstrate novel cabin interior technologies, and is also critical for maximizing the realism of flight experience when human subjects are used in experiments.

This paper describes the progress of the current capability development to reproduce aircraft cabin interior sound field inside a full-scale cabin mock-up. A 40 channel microphone array was built and used to capture in-flight sound recordings of representative flight segments of the NRC Falcon 20 aircraft. The CCER cabin mock-up will be used to reproduce the spatial distribution of the cabin sound field using mini-actuators mounted on the cabin trim panels. Material characterization and modal analysis of the cabin trim panels were conducted through simulations on LMS VirtualLab and validated through experimental tests. The spatial distribution of the aircraft cabin sound pressure levels reproduced using the developed system will be compared with the original recorded sound field within the NRC Falcon 20 aircraft cabin.