Aeroacoustic Investigation of a High-Lift Propeller-Wing Configuration

The increasing demand for cuts in environmental pollution is driving aircraft manufacturers towards sustainable aviation concepts that integrate unconventional propulsion configurations on the airframe, exploiting electrically driven designs. The recent interest in distributed propulsion and electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles have made propeller wake interactions with the airframe of relevance, especially the aerodynamic and aeroacoustic interaction between high-lift wings and propeller slipstreams, which is not yet completely understood. To investigate in detail the underlying physics of such configurations, reliable prediction tools would be required. State-of-the-art prediction tools would typically include fully-geometrically resolving methods, such as Unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) or Wall-Modelled Large Eddy Simulations (WM-LES) approaches, which are able to provide the necessary aerodynamics and aeroacoustics information. In a recent contribution, a faster but physical-principles-based rotor noise prediction method was presented, in order to be able to represent current and possibly newly arising noise sources mechanisms in complex configurations. The tool-chain proposed relies on aerodynamic predictions based on Actuator Disc (AD) Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) computations that provide the background flow solution for the Computational Aeroacoustics (CAA) method, which considers Gaussian regularized line-source distributions of strengths defined from the obtained AD surface loads solution, replacing the propeller blades geometry. In this work, a propeller-wing-flap configuration will be investigated, comparing experimental data with the predictions of the newly introduced approach.