A HYBRID NUMERICAL/EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THE AERODYNAMIC NOISE PREDICTION

Abstract

An accurate noise prediction is important in order to reduce noise emission significantly and to prevent expensive after-design treatments. This study aims to examine the aerodynamics and aeroacoustics performance of an open system consisting of an axial fan and a heat exchanger where hybrid method incorporating CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and CAA (Computational Aeroacoustics) is used to predict the noise behavior. The hybrid model method used consists of three steps. Firstly, the flow is computed by means of flow-computed fluids and the pressure fluctuations are obtained. This is followed by the acquisition of acoustic signals from these fluctuations and the attainment of a sound pressure level approach with the FW-H (Ffowcs Williams & Hawkings) model. Unsteady flow field of the air channel case was obtained by using different turbulence models. The SAS model is capable of resolving largescale turbulent structures without the time and grid-scale resolution restrictions of LES (Large Eddy Simulations), often allowing the use of existing grids created for URANS simulations. For this reason, two different turbulence models, namely URANS (Unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes) model, SAS (Scale Adaptive Simulations) model have been applied. Acoustic sources were computed based on the pressure fluctuations and sound pressure level and frequency dependent graphics were plotted with Fast Fourier Transform. On the other hand, acoustic measurements were performed in a semi-anechoic chamber for both of them. When the experimental and numerical results were compared with the previously determined receiver points, the accuracy rate was obtained as SAS, URANS respectively.