A robust numerical approach for prediction of turbofan engine noise

Abstract

Noise from the aircraft jet engines is still the dominant source in takeoff condition. Government regulations of community noise are getting more stringent, creating significant challenges for aircraft manufacturers to meet these requirements. Expensive nature of experiments as well as accessing to powerful computers have provided new impetus for computational studies. In this paper, an efficient and robust numerical scheme, namely the Lattice Boltzmann Method was used to simulate the sound created by typical internal mixing nozzles with forced mixers. The simulation includes capturing the time-resolved flow characteristics and large scale turbulent structures. The sub grid scales were modeled using the renormalization group (RNG) forms of the standard k-ε equations. Several test cases including cold and hot core flow experiments conducted by NASA were selected for computational setup and validation purposes. The far field sound was predicted using a surface integral method. The near-field simulation results such as the jet centerline velocity decay and turbulence intensities as well as far-field sound were qualitatively in agreement with experimental results. The far-field sound analysis suggested significant low-frequency noise reduction for the lobed mixers, as well as significant reduction in overall sound pressure level (OASPL) in comparison with the simple confluent nozzle configurations.