A High-Fidelity Software Tool for Gas Turbine Engine Noise Prediction

Aerodynamically-generated noise from aircraft is a critical factor in the continuing development of aviation, as community noise concerns and the associated regulatory requirements constrain the design of new airplanes. In particular, supersonic jets are known to produce broadband and narrow-band (screech tones) noise, which contributes to structural fatigue, in addition to the strong environmental noise pollution. The ability to accurately predict noise mechanisms in gas turbine engines will therefore constitute an essential component of any program aimed at producing aircraft engines with low jet noise emissions. Thaerocomp Technical Corp. (TTC) is proposing to develop a high-fidelity CFD-based software tool for accurate, affordable, and reliable prediction of jet noise at all speeds (subsonic, transonic, supersonic, and hypersonic) under realistic flight conditions. The bottlenecks that currently prevent the availability of such a tool are identified and the innovative research required to remove them are proposed. The proposed tool considerably simplifies the procedure of specifying boundary conditions and suggests a better way to calculate turbulence-generated noise. The new procedure will also identify the best approach to compute the propagation of noise far-field from the point of generation. One of the objectives of the proposed research is to obtain highly accurate noise prediction results for high speed jets. Procedures to establish the feasibility of the Phase I research are proposed.