Design and assessment of a distributed active acoustic liner concept for application to aircraft engine noise reduction

Abstract

Acoustic liners are a widespread solution to reduce turbofan noise in aircraft nacelles, due to lightweight and relatively small dimensions for integration within nacelles. Although conventional liners might be designed so as to target multiple tonal frequencies, their passive principle prevents the adaptation to varying engine speeds and therefore lowers their performance during flight, especially in the take-off and landing phases. This paper presents a novel concept of active acoustic liner based on an engineered design of microphones and loudspeakers, aiming at absorbing noise over a broad frequency bandwidth. Integration issues have been taken into account so as to fit to the targeted application to aircraft engines, yielding thickness minimization, with a view to challenging existing passive, narrow-band, liners. The sound absorption performance of the proposed active lining concept is evaluated, through commercially available finite-element software, in a configuration mimicking an aeronautical ins...