Uncertainty Quantification for Direct Aeroacoustic Simulations of Cavity Flows

Abstract

We investigate the influence of uncertain input parameters on the aeroacoustic feedback of cavity flows. The so-called Rossiter feedback requires a direct numerical computation of the acoustic noise, which solves hydrodynamics and acoustics simultaneously, in order to capture the interaction of acoustic waves and the hydrodynamics of the flow. Due to the large bandwidth of spatial and temporal scales, a high-order numerical scheme with low dissipation and dispersion error is necessary to preserve important small scale information. Therefore, the open-source CFD solver FLEXI, which is based on a high-order discontinuous Galerkin spectral element method, is used to perform the aforementioned direct simulations of an open cavity configuration with a laminar upstream boundary layer. To analyze the precision of the deterministic cavity simulation with respect to random input parameters, we establish a framework for uncertainty quantification (UQ). In particular, a nonintrusive spectral projection method with Legendre and Hermite polynomial basis functions is employed in order to treat uniform and normal probability distributions of the random input. The results indicate a strong, nonlinear dependency of the acoustic feedback mechanism on the investigated uncertain input parameters. An analysis of the stochastic results offers new insights into the noise generation process of open cavity flows and reveals the strength of the implemented UQ framework.