Prediction of the aerodynamic noise of an airfoil via the hybrid methods of aeroacoustics

The accurate prediction of the trailing-edge noise and the determination of its sources are essential to reduce fans and propellers noise. This noise component is due to the scattering of the turbulent boundary layer into acoustic waves by the trailing edge. In this paper, the noise emanating from a CD (Controlled-Diffusion) airfoil is simulated and computed via the hybrid methods of aeroacoustics. In these methods, the aerodynamic and acoustic fields are computed separately. The flow data are obtained using the in-house LES solver SFELES. ACTRAN acoustic solver has been used to solve the acoustics and to provide the near and far fields propagation via Lighthill’s analogy. Curle’s analogy is applied as well in its integral compact formulation which takes the presence of walls into account. Curle’s formulation is applied proposing an approach where the volume and surface integrals have been implemented in SFELES to be calculated simultaneously with the flow in order to avoid the storage of noise sources which requires a huge space. In Lighthill’s analogy, sources and near field maps show that the turbulent boundary layer and wake are the more efficient sources and the center of radiation is the trailing edge. The comparison of the numerical results with the experimental measurements, performed by Moreau and Roger and Moreau et al. , shows an overall excellent agreement confirming the capability of SFELES (LES sources) combined with ACTRAN (Lighthill’s analogy) to predict correctly the noise generated by turbulent flows around airfoils. The acoustic spectrum presents an overprediction up to 5 dB at the frequencies 300 Hz and 550 Hz and an underprediction about 5 dB at the frequencies 1100 Hz and 1750 Hz. The sound pressure level (SPL) obtained using the proposed approach of Curle’s analogy matches very well the experimental results. Thus, Curle’s analogy can be used to obtain a fast, approximated and acceptable results about the noise radiation of airfoils avoiding the storage of noise sources which requires a huge space and time.