A review of recent advances in the use of surface integral methods in Computational AeroAcoustics (CAA) for the extension of near-field CFD results to the acoustic far-field is given. These integral formulations (i.e. Kirchhoff's method, permeable (porous) surface Ffowcs-Williams Hawkings (FW-H) equation) allow the radiating sound to be evaluated based on quantities on an arbitrary control surface if the wave equation is assumed outside. Thus only surface integrals are needed for the calculation of the far-field sound, instead of the volume integrals required by the traditional acoustic analogy method (i.e. Lighthill, rigid body FW-H equation). A numerical CFD method is used for the evaluation of the flow-field solution in the near field and thus on the control surface. Diffusion and dispersion errors associated with wave propagation in the far-field are avoided. The surface integrals and the first derivatives needed can be easily evaluated from the near-field CFD data. Both methods can be extended in order to include refraction effects outside the control surface. The methods have been applied to helicopter noise, jet noise, propeller noise, ducted fan noise, etc. A simple set of portable Kirchhoff/FW-H subroutines can be developed to calculate the far-field noise from inputs supplied by any aerodynamic near/mid-field CFD code.

A comprehensive review of the use of Kirchhoff’s method in computational aeroacoustics is given. Kirchhoff’s integral formulation allows radiating sound to be evaluated based on quantities on an arbitrary control surface S if the wave equation is assumed outside. The control surface S is assumed to include all the nonlinear flow effects and noise sources. Thus only surface integrals are needed for the calculation of the far-field sound. A numerical CFD method can be used for the evaluation of the flow-field solution in the near-field and thus on surface S. Kirchhoff’s integral formulation has been extended to an arbitrary, moving, deformable piecewise-continuous surface. The available Kirchhoff formulations are reviewed and various aeroacoustic applications are given. The relative merits of Kirchhoff’s method are also discussed.

We present 3-D Large Eddy Simulation (LES) results for a turbulent isothermal round jet at a Reynolds number of 100,000. Our recently developed LES code is part of a Computational Aeroacoustics (CAA) methodology that couples surface integral acoustics methods with LES for the far field noise estimation of turbulent jets. The LES code employs high-order accurate compact differencing together with implicit spatial filtering and state-of-the-art non-reflecting boundary conditions. A localized dynamic Smagorinsky subgrid-scale (SGS) model is used for representing the effects of the unresolved scales on the resolved scales. A computational grid consisting of 12 million points was used in the present simulation. Mean flow results obtained in our simulation are found to be in excellent agreement with the available experimental data of jets at similar flow conditions. Furthermore, the near field data provided by LES is coupled with the Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings method to compute the far field noise. Far field aeroacoustics results are also presented and comparisons are made with another computational study.

This study is focused on developing a Computational Aeroacoustics (CAA) methodology that couples the near field unsteady flow field data computed by a 3-D Large Eddy Simulation (LES) code with various integral acoustic formulations for the far field noise prediction of turbulent jets. Noise computations performed for a Reynolds number 400,000 jet using various integral acoustic results are presented and the results are compared against each other as well with an experimental jet at similar flow conditions. Our results show that the surface integral acoustics methods (Kirchhoff and Ffowcs Williams -Hawkings) give similar results to the volume integral method (Lighthill's acoustic analogy) at a much lower cost. To our best knowledge, Lighthill's acoustic analogy was applied to a reasonably high Reynolds number jet for the first time in this study. A database greater than 1 Terabytes (TB) in size was post-processed using 1160 processors in parallel on a modern supercomputing platform for this purpose.

This work investigates high‐order central compact methods for simulating turbulent supersonic flows that include shock waves. Several different types of previously proposed characteristic filters, including total variation diminishing, monotone upstream‐centered scheme for conservation laws, and weighted essentially non‐oscillatory filters, are investigated in this study. Similar to the traditional shock capturing schemes, these filters can eliminate the numerical instability caused by large gradients in flow fields, but they also improve efficiency compared with classical shock‐capturing schemes. Adding the nonlinear dissipation part of a classical shock‐capturing scheme to a central scheme makes the method suitable for incorporation into any existing central‐based high‐order subsonic code. The amount of numerical dissipation to add is sensed by means of the artificial compression method switch. In order to improve the performance of the characteristic filters, we propose a hybrid approach to minimize the dissipation added by the characteristic filter. Through several numerical experiments (including a shock/density wave interaction, a shock/vortex interaction, and a shock/mixing layer interaction) we show that our hybrid approach works better than the original method, and can be used for future turbulent flow simulations that include shocks. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.