Computation of aeolian tone from a circular cylinder using source models

Abstract

The generation of aeolian tones from a two-dimensional circular cylinder situated in a uniform cross-flow is investigated. The major emphasis here is placed on identifying the important noise generation mechanisms. Acoustic-viscous splitting techniques are utilized to compute modelled acoustic source terms and their corresponding acoustic fields. The incompressible Reynolds averaged Navier–Stokes equation is used to compute the near-field viscous flow solution, from which modelled acoustic source terms are extracted based on an approximation to the Lighthill’s stress tensor. Acoustic fields are then computed with an acoustic solver to solve the linearized Euler equations forced by the modelled source terms. Computations of the acoustic field based on the approximated Lighthill’s stress tensor are shown to be in good agreement with those computed from the surface dipole sources obtained using Curle’s solution to the acoustic analogy. It is shown in this paper that the stress tensor source term in the streamwise direction makes a comparable, but slightly larger contribution to the overall radiated field, compared with that due to the stress tensor in the direction normal to the mean flow. In addition, it is shown that shear sources, which arise due to the interaction between the fluctuating velocity and the background steady mean velocity, make the greatest contribution to the acoustic field, while the self-noise sources, which represents the interaction between the fluctuating velocities, is shown to be comparably negligible.