Implementation of Aeroacoustic Methods in OpenFOAM

Abstract: A general method is established for external low Mach-number flows where aeroacoustic analogies are used to decouple the sound generation from the sound propagation. The CFD solver OpenFOAM is used to compute the flow induced sound sources and Ffowcs-Williams and Hawkings acoustic analogy is implemented to calculate the propagation of sound. Incompressible and compressible source data is gathered for a test case and upon evaluation of the noise emission the assumption of incompressibility prove to be valid for a low Mach-number flow. Furthermore the advantage of non-reflecting boundary conditions in OpenFOAM is appraised and found to be effective. Lastly the method is tested on a more complicated test case in terms of a generic side mirror and results are found to agree well with previous studies.