Wind noise due to flow induced around a windscreen in large-scale turbulence

Abstract

Turbulent wind noise on microphones is a ubiquitous problem for sound measurement and recording outdoors. Windscreens, such as open-cell foam spheres, are effective at reducing wind noise. The unsteady pressure sources induced on the windscreen surface must contribute less noise on average than the stagnation pressure on a bare microphone, or windscreens would not be effective. To quantify this noise reduction mechanism, a model is presented for the unsteady pressure within an impermeable windscreen of arbitrary shape immersed in an initially isotropic turbulent flow. Only turbulent scales larger than the windscreen are considered, which contribute the most intense low-frequency band of the noise spectrum in most practical situations. The inhomogeneous velocity field around the windscreen is modeled in terms of an induced irrotational blocking field that meets the kinematic boundary condition. The interior pressure is expressed as a convolution of the surface pressure field with a filter function in wavevector space. The wind noise wavevector spectrum is then shown to be only a function of the inflow isotropic velocity spectrum and the windscreen shape. Solutions are obtained for the pressure frequency spectrum within a spherical windscreen for a von Kármán turbulence model and compared with prior results in literature.