Noise pollution in the vicinity of airports is a significant challenge for aircraft manufacturers. Modern Ultra-High Bypass Ratio engines have enabled to significantly decrease jet and tonal noise. Yet in these engines fan BroadBand Noise (BBN) has become a major contributor. The characteristics of BBN are intrinsically related to turbulence and its local statistics.
Despite research programs having been launched on the topic, some aspects of BBN remain unknown such as the way, once produced, acoustic energy distributes among the allowed propagating acoustic modes in the engine, thereby leading to the far-field sound which needs to be reduced.
Following a previous PRACE allocation (LESFAN), the main objective of the project SoFAN is to perform for the first time Large Eddy Simulations designed for the aeroacoustic analysis of a full fan stage at its nominal rotation speed. Investigations will concern a newly developed open test-case (ECL5), being investigated experimentally at the home institution of the authors.
The simulation results are expected to drive improvements of reduced-order models and establish a reproducible methodology for BBN predictions in a realistic strongly compressible context. The large size and the high geometrical complexity of this representative fan stage requires the use of High-Performance Computing (HPC).
Alexis Giauque, Ecole Centrale de Lyon, France