Further assessment of a time domain impedance boundary condition for the numerical simulation of noise-absorbing materials

Abstract

In regard to the mitigation of environmental noise across major industry sectors, the present study focuses on the numerical prediction of passive noise reduction devices. Here, it is further explored how the noise attenuation induced by locally reacting noise absorbing materials (also called acoustic liners) can be simulated using a time domain highly accurate Computational AeroAcoustics (CAA) method. To this end, it is assessed how a classical Time Domain Impedance Boundary Condition (TDIBC) can effectively model acoustic liners of practical interest, including when the latter are exposed to realistic conditions (grazing flow and noise excitation). The investigation consists in numerically reproducing two experimental campaigns initially performed at NASA Langley Research Center. Two different materials are considered (honeycomb superimposed with perforate or wiremesh resistive face-sheet), each being characterized by a specific noise attenuation behaviour (e.g. dependency on the flow conditions and/or noise excitation). Each material is tested under various flow conditions (e.g. grazing flow of Mach up to 0.5) and/or noise source excitation (e.g. multiple tones of level up to 140 dB each). The results demonstrate the ability of the underlying CAA/TDIBC approach to simulate realistic acoustic liners in non-trivial configurations, with enough physical accuracy (e.g. correct capture of the noise attenuation characteristics) and numerical robustness (e.g. absence of instabilities). The study also reveals that, independent from the CAA/TDIBC approach itself, some specific pre-processing tasks (e.g. impedance eduction and subsequent TDIBC calibration) may play a bigger role than expected, in practice.