A Wave Expansion Method for Aeroacoustic Propagation

Although it is possible to directly solve an entire flow-acoustics problem in one computation, this approach remains prohibitively large in terms of the computational resource required for most practical applications. Aeroacoustic problems are therefore usually split into two parts; one consisting of the source computation and one of the source propagation. Although both these parts entail great challenges on the computational method, in terms of accuracy and efficiency, it is still better than the direct solution alternative. The source usually consists of highly turbulent flows, which for most cases will need to be, at least partly, resolved. Then, acoustic waves generated by these sources often have to be propagated for long distances compared to the wavelength and might be subjected to scattering by solid objects or convective effects by the flow. Numerical methods used solve these problems therefore have to possess low dispersion and dissipation error qualities for the solution to be accurate and resource efficient. The wave expansion method (WEM) is an efficient discretization technique, which is used for wave propagation problems. The method uses fundamental solutions to the wave operator in the discretization procedure and will thus produce accurate results at two to three points per wavelength. This thesis presents a method that uses the WEM in an aeroacoustic context. Addressing the propagation of acoustic waves and transfer of sources from flow to acoustic simulations. The proposed computational procedure is applied to a co-rotating vortex pair and a cylinder in cross-flow. Overall, the computed results agree well with analytical solutions. Although the WEM is efficient in terms of the spatial discretization, the procedure requires that a Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse is evaluated at each unique node-neighbour stencil in the grid. This evaluation significantly slows the procedure and might even be more time consuming than the system matrix inversion. In this thesis, a method with a regular grid is explored to speed-up this process. Furthermore, a procedure for introducing irregular regions, while preserving the speed-up in the regular parts, is also presented.