The noise generated by a landing gear wheel with hub and rim cavities

Abstract

Wheels are one of the major noise sources of landing gears. Accurate numerical predictions of wheel noise can provide an insight into the physical mechanism of landing gear noise generation and can aid in the design of noise control devices. The major noise sources of a 33% scaled isolated landing gear wheel are investigated by simulating three different wheel configurations using high-order numerical simulations to compute the flow field and the FW-H equation to obtain the far-field acoustic pressures. The baseline configuration is a wheel with a hub cavity and two rim cavities. Two additional simulations are performed; one with the hub cavity covered (NHC) and the other with both the hub cavity and rim cavities covered (NHCRC).

Interaction Noise from Tandem Landing Gear Wheels with Hub and Rim Cavities

“…Surrounding the sidewall and the hub cavity are two rim cavities, the depth of which are approximately 0.045D. This wheel geometry is the same with the previous isolated single wheel numerical studies by Wang et al 7,8 and experimental investigations by Zhang et al 6 In the current simulation, the two wheels are inline with a separation distance of L = 1.5D, and the angle of attack is 0 • . The numerical simulations were performed on multi-block structured grids.…”

“…The wheel geometry used by Spagnolo et al 16 is a simplified wheel without hub and rim cavities. As discussed in the isolated wheel case by Wang et al, 8 the hub cavity and rim cavities have minor effects on the large-scale structures around the wheel, and those large scales dominate the RMS of surface pressure fluctuations. Additionally, the hub cavity and rim cavities are located at the side of the wheel.…”

“…A grid sensitivity was performed by Wang et al, 7 and showed that this grid resolution was adequate to provide good agreement to the aerodynamic and acoustic experimental results. The detailed mesh topology and grid distributions were described by Wang et al 7,8 …”

“…The mean and RMS of the lift, drag and side force coefficients are given in Table 1, together with the isolated single wheel (SW) case by Wang et al 8 The mean drag coefficient of the downstream wheel is approximately twice that of the upstream wheel, since the downstream wheel is immersed in the wake of the upstream wheel. The fluctuating side force C rms dominates.…”

“…They found that the wheel noise is characterized by broadband middle frequency noise centred around 630 Hz and 1250 Hz. Wang et al 7,8 conducted numerical simulations with the same geometry used by Zhang et al 6 and found that the noise at 630 Hz and 1250 Hz is generated by the first and second depth modes of the hub cavity. However, these previous works have not considered the interaction noise from wheels in tandem, which is significant for four-wheel and six-wheel landing gear noise.…”