Plasma Fairings for Quieting Aircraft Landing Gear Noise

This Phase II SBIR project deals with the design, development, and testing of a "Plasma Fairing" to reduce noise on the Gulfstream G550 landing gear. The plasma fairing will use single dielectric barrier discharge (SDBD) plasma actuators to reduce flow- separations and impingement around the landing gear, which are the dominant sources of landing gear noise. The Phase I project successfully demonstrated the feasibility of the plasma fairing concept on a generalized tandem cylinder configuration that shared important features of key sections of the G550 landing gear, specifically the relationship between the strut and the torque arm. The Phase II extends the concept to a more complex geometry: G550 landing gear. We will develop aeroacoustic simulations using University of Notre Dame's state-of-the-art plasma actuator model and Exa Corporation's flow solver PowerFLOW, coupled with experiments in an anechoic wind tunnel with both aerodynamic and acoustic measurements on a scaled G550 nose gear model to design and optimize a Plasma Fairing configuration that provides significant noise reduction on the G550 landing gear. We anticipate a technology readiness level (TRL) of 5 at the end of the Phase II project.