Noise radiation from a ducted rotor in a swirling-translating flow

Abstract

This paper investigates the noise radiation produced by a rotor inside a duct, which is convected by a swirling-translating mean flow. The study is based on an extension of Gennaretti's and Morino's boundary element method to the frequency domain for scattering problems in conjunction with a spinning rotor source model in the presence of a swirl flow. The proposed formulation is validated against exact solutions and is further used to investigate the effects of the translating flow Mach number and swirling flow angular velocity on noise radiation to the far field. The scattered sound is highly affected by the convecting mean flow. The modal content of the scattered field increases when increasing the translating flow Mach number, while a swirling flow leads to a reduction of the mode propagation, if co-rotating with respect to the azimuthal order of the spinning source, or an increase of the modal content, if counter-rotating with respect to the source. In general, the mean translating flow moves the main lobes of the directivity patterns downstream, while in some cases the mean swirling flow neglects this effect and the downstream lobe is completely shifted.