Reduce cabin sound without paying for it in weight.
The innovation program targeted cabin sound below 40 dB SIL3 (Speech Interference Level) while using roughly half the acoustic-treatment weight normally required. The technical path was not a single product: it depended on understanding sound paths, developing physical countermeasures, improving measurements and giving engineers a way to evaluate cabin configurations before expensive flight testing.
Six workstreams, plus two external team interfaces.
The work covered the system from measurement to prediction to physical control. My role was to keep the streams connected: understand what each team needed from the others, plan around shared facilities and measurements, surface dependencies, and keep technical decisions aligned with the overall cabin target.
In addition to the six workstreams, I synchronized the program with two other teams whose work affected measurements, interfaces and delivery.
Program ownership with hands-on technical work.
- Designed the architecture and built the cabin-sound simulation tool, from data model through calculations and user interface.
- Planned and organized measurement campaigns, deciding what to measure and when, coordinating access to facilities and sequencing work around other teams.
- Developed a physical sound-control concept for one cabin area, including a solution that maintained airflow while strongly attenuating sound.
- Connected technical and stakeholder decisions across engineering, measurement, sales and leadership expectations.
The program produced three market-ready solutions: the software and physical sound-control solutions for two cabin areas. The broader prototype portfolio included software iterations, vibration-control concepts and sound-control concepts.
A data-calibrated cabin-sound simulation tool.
Before the tool, engineers could not reliably estimate whether a new cabin treatment would reach the target sound level without testing it. Those tests are expensive because meaningful validation may require a customer cabin in flight, so iteration opportunities are limited. Historical knowledge was also largely tacit and could be lost between engineers.
I built the tool to turn that implicit knowledge and measurement data into a reusable engineering system. The primary users were Lufthansa Technik acoustic engineers.
Cabin dimensions, installations, acoustic treatments, flight speed, altitude
Source sound power, transmission loss and measurement-derived data
Least-squares fitting of trim factors to reconcile inconsistent data
Combine source and treatment effects for the selected configuration
Source contributions, cabin SIL3, treatment weight and trade-offs
Why the calibration layer mattered
The source measurements did not form one perfectly consistent cabin model. A least-squares optimization layer learned trim factors that adjusted individual measurements so they could be combined into a coherent view of the cabin. This made the tool a data-calibrated model rather than a static calculator.
Product development
I built the tool in Excel deliberately, prioritizing long-term maintainability in the engineering environment. Calculation layers were validated against known cases; the user interface was tested directly with acoustic engineers. Early versions were intentionally minimal. As users validated the concept, later iterations added more inputs, outputs and calculations. The MVP was delivered in roughly two months.
Public sources for the broader research program.
The technical details of the cabin areas and the proprietary solutions remain confidential. Public ENTIRETY project material documents the broader goal of reducing VIP-cabin noise while reducing acoustic-treatment weight, identifying airborne and structure-borne transmission paths, developing optimized sound-reduction concepts and validating them experimentally.