Fan broadband noise shielding for over-wing engines

Abstract

Increasingly demanding community noise targets are promoting noise performance ever higher on the list of airliner design drivers. In response, significant noise reductions are being made, though at a declining rate—it appears that a whole airframe approach is now needed to achieve significant further gains. As a possible step in this direction, over-wing engine installations are considered here, which use the airframe itself as a noise shield. The paper is the account of an experimental investigation of the comparative shielding performances of a range of relative engine positions on such a layout. Using the statistical modelling technique Kriging, we build an approximation of the noise shielding metric as a function of the position of the engines above the wing—this can serve as the input to multi-disciplinary design trade-off studies. We then compare the results found with the results of applying simple half-barrier diffraction theory to the same problem. We conclude that the latter could be considered as a first order, conceptual design tool, though it misses certain features of the design merit landscape identified by the experiment presented here.