Experimental and Numerical Investigation of the Aerodynamic Noise Radiated From a Centrifugal Blower

Abstract

Centrifugal blowers are widely used as garden machines, however, the aerodynamic noise generated by these machines cause serious problems. Although many researches focus on the generation mechanism and prediction method of centrifugal fan noise, most of these researches analysis the simplified centrifugal fan models and ignore the diffraction and scattering effect. In this paper, both experimental and numerical methods are carried out to analysis and measure the aerodynamic noise of the centrifugal blower. In order to calculate the flow field, a CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) numerical model is established, and the LES (Large Eddy Simulation) model is used to solve the three-dimensional unsteady flow, while the FW-H (Ffows Williams-Hawkings) model is used to calculate the acoustic source. To consider the diffraction and scattering effect, a BEM method is used to predict the sound radiated from the blower. A parallel experiment is carried out to measure the aerodynamic noise in a semi-anechoic room, and the numerical result shows a good agreement with the experiment result. The effect of outlet and inlet ducts on the sound radiation of the centrifugal blower is also investigated in this paper.