Extensions and limitations of analytical airfoil broadband noise models

Abstract

The present paper is a state-of-the-art of a special class of analytical models to predict the broadband noise generated by thin airfoils in a flow, either clean or disturbed. Three generating mechanisms are addressed, namely the noise from the impingement of upstream turbulence called turbulence-interaction noise, the noise due to the scattering of boundary-layer turbulence as sound at the trailing edge for an attached flow called trailing-edge noise, and the noise generated due to the formation of a coherent vortex shedding in the near wake of a thick trailing edge, called vortex-shedding noise. Different analytical models previously proposed for each mechanism are reviewed, as declinations of the same basic approach inherited from the pioneer work performed by Amiet in the seventies and based on an extensive use of Schwarzschild's technique. This choice is only an alternative to other models available in the literature and is made here for the sake of a unified approach. Issues dealing with the input data and related to the practical applications to fan noise predictions are rapidly outlined. The validity of the models is ckeched against dedicated experiments with thin airfoils and the limitations as the real configurations depart from the model assumptions are pointed out.