CFD/CAA-Prognose von Aerodynamik und Schallabstrahlung von Polimi’s Vario C12 Propellern in Einzel- und Tandem- Anordnung

Institute

Lehrstuhl für Aerodynamik

Type

Semester Thesis / Master's Thesis /

Content

theoretical /  

Description

Background
Noise emission from propellers on airplanes, UAVs and drones is an important issue with respect to its acceptability and usage for civil and military purposes. Quantitative prediction of sound is important for the understanding of installation effects and the interferences with fuselage and other propulsors. For the validation of hybrid acoustic prediction methods used in CAA (computational aeroacoustics) within the Garteur action group AG 26 a number of test cases on small-scale set-ups with rotor diameter below 300 mm have been studied in wind-tunnels, anechoic chambers and by numerical simulation. At Politecnico die Milano (Polimi) various measurement campaigns have been carried out for a 3-bladed Varioprop C12 geometry in single and tandem configuration both for hover and for flight conditions with different advance ratios. Some results are published in Zanotti et al. 2025. For hover cases measurements of thrust, torque and radiated sound are available for comparison with numerical predictions. A special challenge for CFD is posed by the low chord Reynolds number on the blades implying the necessity to use transition models for the prediction of the boundary layer evolution along the blades.

Goals and Tasks
An existing simulation framework combining Ansys Fluent CFD simulations on sliding meshes and the in house Ffwocs-Williams Hawkings solver Spysi developed at FAU Erlangen (Scheit et al. 2012) shall be used for the assessment of tonal noise radiation from single and hover configurations with varying lateral spacing between two propellers in an axial distance of 0,5 diameter as shown in Fig. 1. Using the grid generator ICEM-CFD the quality of an existing multi-block mesh has to be improved and meshes for a systematic grid refinement study shall be prepared. For a single rotor in hover the influence of mesh quality, turbulence resp. transition model, and of set-up (steady case in rotating frame of reference versus sliding mesh technique for an inner rotating domain) on aerodynamics and tonal noise shall be studied systematically. Thereafter tandem configurations shall be investigated for different lateral spacing. If time allows the influence of the phase-shift between the two rotors in tandem configuration is to be investigated.

Requirements

Requirements, supervisor
Prerequisite is background in CFD methods and experience with commercial solvers from ANSYS, especially FLUENT. Good knowledge on the use of the grid generation software ANSYS ICEM CFD is mandatory as well as the ability to work in a Linux environment on PCs / workstations at TUM and on
the Linux cluster of LRZ.

Information and supervision by

Prof. Dr.-Ing. H.-J. Kaltenbach. ( hans-jakob.kaltenbach@tum.de )
089.28916397

The thesis work can be started all times.

Possible start

sofort

Contact

Prof. H.-J. Kaltenbach
Phone: 089.28916397
hans-jakob.kaltenbachtum.de

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