Initial noise predictions for rudimentary landing gear

Abstract

A four-wheel “rudimentary” landing gear (RLG) truck was designed for public-domain research, with a level of complexity which is manageable in current numerical simulations, and a weak Reynolds-number sensitivity. Experimental measurements of wall-pressure fluctuations are allowing a meaningful test of unsteady simulations with emphasis on noise generation. We present three Detached-Eddy Simulations (DES) using up to 18 million points in the high-order NTS code. The first is incompressible with the model placed in the wind tunnel, as requested for the 2010 workshop on Benchmark problems for Airframe Noise Computations (BANC-I), intended for force and surface-pressure studies. The second and third are at Mach 0.115 and Mach 0.23, with only one wall, a “ceiling” analogous to a wing (but infinite and inviscid), and are used to exercise far-field noise prediction by coupling the Detached-Eddy Simulations and a Ffowcs-Williams/Hawkings calculation. The results include wall-pressure, and far-field-noise intensities and spectra. The wall pressure signals in the three simulations are very similar and, in a comparison published separately, agree well with experiment and other simulations. In the absence of experimental noise data, the attention is focused on internal quality checks, by varying the permeable Ffowcs-Williams/Hawkings calculation surface and then by using only the solid surface. An unexpected finding at these Mach numbers is an apparent strong role for quadrupoles, revealed by a typical deficit of 3 dB in the solid-surface results, relative to the permeable-surface results. The solid-surface approach has variants, related to the presence of the ceiling (a plane of symmetry), which can increase this error further; there is little consensus on the exact configuration of the solid surfaces in the Ffowcs-Williams/Hawkings calculation procedure. Tentative theoretical arguments suggest that a balance somewhat in favor of quadrupoles over dipoles is plausible at Mach 0.115. However, the scaling of sound with Mach number does not follow the eighth power, as quadrupoles do in theory: it is closer to the sixth power. This trend gives a muddled theoretical picture, but agrees with the scaling observed in experiments. If it is confirmed, this finding will complicate airframe-noise calculations, and prevent the attribution of noise to a given component of the aircraft. Progress in airframe-noise simulations appears real, but systematic grid-refinement studies and noise comparisons with experiment or other simulations have yet to occur, and the theoretical uncertainty is high.