Accurate aeroacoustic measurements in closed-section hard-walled wind tunnels

Abstract

Noise emissions from aircraft are of major concern to aircraft manufacturers. There are various analytical, empirical and numerical tools to help in the design of quieter aircraft, however aeroacoustic measurements in wind tunnels are still required. There is a growing interest in simultaneous aerodynamic and aeroacoustic measurements in hard-walled closed-section wind tunnels. The research hypothesis of this work is whether accurate aeroacoustic measurements are possible in this type of wind tunnel. Two issues are of particular concern: the reverberation sound field and high background noise levels. De-reverberation, based on an Image Source Model (ISM), is proposed to tackle the first issue by incorporating the reflections in the focused beamformer. This technique is computationally fast and easy to implement. Source Power Integration and deconvolution techniques are shown to be still valid in de-reverberation. Measurements in a closed section wind tunnel have shown that an ISM gives a better estimate of the Green's functions, when compared to free-space Green's functions. Furthermore de-reverberation yielded more accurate source strength estimates from the beamformer. Qualitatively, de-convolved results were no different than when using free-space Green's functions. Simulations have shown that the ISM can become unstable at high frequencies if position errors are present. It is therefore recommended to limit the application of the ISM to frequencies below 10 kHz. At low frequencies the accuracy of beamforming levels is highly dependent on the level of noise contamination of the input data. Removing the diagonal of the cross spectral matrix might not be sufficient to eliminate this noise.

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