CFD and Aeroacoustic Analysis of Wingtip-Mounted Propellers

Abstract

The wingtip-mounted propeller configuration is widely used in many aircraft, especially with the emergence of urban air mobility. This study focuses on analyzing the aeroacoustic properties of this configuration by understanding the aerodynamic interaction between the propeller and wing. Computational Fluid Dynamics based on Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations was used to calculate the flow field and the aerodynamic loads on a wingtip-mounted propeller model and were compared with experimental data for validation. The resulting surface pressure was fed as input data for the acoustic analysis performed using a Ffowcs-Williams Hawkings equation-based acoustic solver at multiple angles of attack. It was observed that the presence of the wing significantly increases the propeller noise along the rotational axis. As the angle of attack increases, the propeller noise increases further. However, the wing noise decreases with the angle of attack due to propeller wake dissipation, leading to only a small increase in the maximum total noise.