Geometry effect on the airfoil-gust interaction noise in transonic flows

Abstract

Numerical simulations are conducted to investigate the impacts of airfoil thickness, the angle of attack and camber on the airfoil-gust interaction noise in transonic flows where locally supersonic regimes and terminating shocks are present. The conclusions about the geometry effects based on the extensively studied subsonic cases are revisited. With the increase of airfoil thickness, the sound generation is reduced in the downstream direction as in subsonic flows. More sound is produced in the upstream direction for thicker airfoils due to the non-uniform mean flow and shocks in the near field. The compensative effect makes the overall sound reduction by the airfoil thickness less than the subsonic cases despite the significant difference in the radiation patterns. The acoustic responses to the single frequency gusts are sensitive to the airfoil angle of attack in transonic flows. However, the overall differences are reduced when multiple wavenumber components are superposed in isotropic turbulence, and the sound pressure levels are therefore close as in subsonic flows. Similarly, the significant variations in single frequency acoustic responses by airfoil camber are averaged by the superposition of various wavenumber components. However, apparent variations are still found in the upstream direction, especially for the turbulences with small integral length scales.