On Boundary Conditions for Acoustic Computations in Non-Uniform Mean Flows

Abstract

Many acoustic problems involve acoustic wave radiation to the exterior field. A common approach in numerical simulations is to restrict the computational domain to a finite region with artificial boundaries. The so-called radiation or non-reflecting boundary conditions must be imposed at those artificial boundaries. Most existing non-reflecting boundary conditions are derived for computing disturbances propagating in a known uniform mean flow near the boundaries. In many applications such as the computation of jet noise or turbofan noise, the mean flow at an artificial boundary is non-uniform and unknown. The mean flow also needs to be computed in these cases. Incorrect computation of this mean flow at the boundary could directly affect the near field physics as well as the far field acoustics. In the present paper, a set of boundary conditions is proposed which focuses on computing the correct mean solution at an artificial boundary, while still maintaining the non-reflecting feature for the outgoing transient and acoustic waves.