Abstract
The noise generated by different types of fans used in the turbomachinery industry is a topic that has been studied for many years. However, researchers are still looking for a universal solution to reduce noise while maintaining the performance of these machines. This paper, as a contribution to the research, presents the results of numerical investigations of an axial fan installed in a pipeline with a circular cross-section. In particular, the focus was on investigating the sensitivity of the sound power level to changes in selected design and operational parameters of this fan. The simulation studies used the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) approach and the Ffowcs Williams–Hawkings (FW-H) analogy implemented in Ansys Fluent.
Highlights
Axial fans typically work in very turbulent flow conditions, e.g., because of their installations in pipelines, behind radiators, etc
Noise from flow machines consists of tonal noise, as a result of the interactions among the turbine blades and stationary housing components or guide vanes and broadband noise resulting from the acoustic signal generated by strong turbulent structures occurring in the flow
The first is time averaging, which is known as the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) simulation (URANS), the second is a spatial filtering of the full Navier–Stokes equations, called large eddy simulation (LES)
Summary
Axial fans typically work in very turbulent flow conditions, e.g., because of their installations in pipelines, behind radiators, etc. This results in very unstable aerodynamic forces on the impeller blades, which in turn cause excessive sound radiation. The most modern aeroacoustic computational methods enable increasingly reliable predictions of the generated noise. They usually require specific information about the transient flow field, obtained by simulation using computational fluid dynamics methods. The most accurate of these methods, a direct numerical simulation (DNS), could solve the Navier–Stokes equation with no simplifications and could predict the unsteady flow and the associated acoustic field. The first is time averaging, which is known as the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) simulation (URANS), the second is a spatial filtering of the full Navier–Stokes equations, called large eddy simulation (LES)
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