Wang helps advance sonic boom research
Nov 15th, 2012 | By tfedderson2 | Category: 2012, Issue, Nov. 15, ResearchResearch by Lily Wang, associate professor of architectural engineering, was featured Oct. 18 on ScienceDaily.
Funded by NASA, Wang’s work with graduate student Christopher Ainley explored how noise bursts affect the performance and perceptions of test subjects. The UNL team worked to “find a threshold value under which the noise would not significantly affect” the research subjects, who were studied while they concentrated on math problems.
The research helped NASA advance its low-boom supersonic aircraft program and mitigate sonic booms.
Durham School researchers tested bursts of approximately 50 to 80 dBA (decibel units measured with a filter used to approximate the human ear’s response to sound), with sounds at the lower level comparable to street noise and, at higher numbers, near the sound level of an operating vacuum cleaner.
Read more about the research at http://go.unl.edu/dgm.