Landing gear interwheel tonal noise characterization with the Boundary Element Method

Abstract

Landing gear noise is mainly broadband in nature, but it can also feature some tonal contributions. Tonal noise significantly increases noise annoyance and can originate from facing cavities in landing gear wheels. The present work aims at using the Boundary Element Method (BEM) with a simple harmonic point source model to characterize the resonance between the two facing cylindrical cavities in the wheels of the generic nose landing gear LAGOON, where a flow independence of the tonal noise emission has been reported experimentally. Three configurations of increasing complexity are successively considered: a single wheel, the two facing wheels linked by an axle, and finally the whole landing gear, including the main strut. In terms of resonant frequencies, the BEM is shown to give results in very good agreement with analytical formulae and CFD/CAA computations from the literature. Some acoustic measurements are also performed for the whole LAGOON configuration and a very good agreement is observed between BEM results and the experimental database. The directivity of the resonant modes is detailed for each case and compared with success to CFD/CAA results, except for convective amplification effects. The amplification of each resonant mode is quantified through a so-called scattering factor and it is shown that the facing cavities present much sharper resonances than the single cavity, and that the presence of the main strut only increases the amplification of the axisymmetric mode. Finally, the modelisation of the interwheel space by an annular duct is discussed and a parametric study is conducted on the axle diameter. The results of this parametric study shed light on the annular duct model domain of validity while demonstrating the ability of the BEM to treat geometries of arbitrary complexity with low computational cost when analytical models are unavailable.