Noise prediction for a turbulent jet using different hybrid methods

Abstract The acoustic field of a cold single stream jet at Mach number 0.9 and Reynolds number 3600 is determined via computational aeroacoustics (CAA) methods. The jet computation of the acoustical field is performed by two hybrid approaches using a large-eddy simulation (LES) for the flow field and various systems of equations for the acoustical field to construct a robust, efficient, and reliable LES/CAA solver. The acoustic equations are the Ffowcs Williams–Hawkings equation (FWH) in the frequency domain and the acoustic perturbation equations (APE). The pronounced impact of the data windowing and the radial and streamwise extension of the integration surface on the directivity of the FWH solution is discussed at length. The comparison with available experimental and numerical results at similar flow conditions based on the noise characteristics in the near field shows the solution of the APE system to match the results of the direct LES more accurately than the FWH approach. The APE solution is less susceptible to the size of the source term region than the FWH approach to the location of the source surface. In conjunction with the APE formulation the LES domain can be chosen smaller than for the FWH ansatz resulting in less computational cost for the jet flow. The dominant source term in the APE system for cold jet noise is shown to be the Lamb vector.