Stochastic modelling of leading-edge noise in time-domain using vortex particles

Abstract

The interaction of a wing/blade profile with turbulent inflow is one of the main sources of sound generation in turbomachines. There are already several noise prediction methodologies available which either appear not to account for the influence of geometrical and flow parameters on noise generation or have been able to account for a remarkably limited extent due to the requirement of high-performance computing for flow calculations. This leads to the motivation of the current paper, which presents a low-cost and easy-to-use noise prediction methodology based on the statistical modelling of the inflow turbulence and Lookup Table (LUT) approach for aeroacoustic design and optimisation. The development of the statistical method is divided into three parts; namely – i) calculating the background flow, ii) modelling of statistically optimised inflow disturbance, iii) computing the far-field sound pressure for individual vortex passages and superpose them linearly – this step involves repeated computation of identical vortex passages and can be therefore easily sped up using a database approach. In the framework of this work, a new approach to model the inflow turbulence using vortex particles characterised by shape functions, based on waveforms, is presented. The idea is to not conduct a time-dependent unsteady calculation of the flow field in real-time, instead to consider the mean flow around the profile in the computational domain, in which the vortex particles are convected to realise a statistical turbulent signal. The convection of these vortex particles, also, does not take place in the real-time calculation, instead, vortices of every possible size and strength are convected in a similar domain with a specific airfoil, and the acoustic radiation due to their interaction with the airfoil are computed and stored in a database. The far-field noise is predicted using Curle’s formulation. The generated database is accessed using the LUT approach to rapidly extract the acoustic signals. Through this approach, the influence of geometrical as well as flow parameters on the noise generated by airfoils can be quantified without requiring to conduct a numerical simulation every time for a new set of geometrical and flow variables. In the article, the application of the method for different blade profiles is shown, and the results obtained are compared with the standard literature.