Methods to Predict Structural Response due to Random Sound Pressure Fields

Abstract: To predict structural responses due to random sound pressure fields are of great interest within many fields of aircraft development, particularly within acoustic fatigue problems and definition of vibration requirements.  Today there exist some methods to quantify sound pressure fields affecting the air-fighters. Some of them are considered to be expensive, time consuming or with high computational cost. Examples of this would be to measure a real flight, produce data from wind tunnels, use Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) or obtain data from an engineering database. Once the sound pressure levels are known they can be applied as loads to structural models and this is the area studied in this work. To study these problems a new working tool is made using MATLAB. The tool’s main purpose is to give an opportunity to study structural responses caused by random sound pressure fields with different correlation methods.  Because of the complexity of both the sound pressure and different structures of the aircraft a few limitations are considered. The plate is used since this makes is easy to produce different mode shape functions. The mode shape function is an important part in this work as it can be used to create all possible frequency response functions in a structure. Then, to determine a structure response, different methods to produce pressure fields are used. The methods are called correlation-models and five different models are considered: uncorrelated, fully correlated and moving correlated load (MCL) and two empirical models due to the similarity to real sound pressure fields called Turbulent Boundary Layer (TBL) and a diffuse excitation model. To prove the accuracy of the created working tool, an independent FE-solver is used called Abaqus. Abaqus  is  used  to  validate  the  mode  shape-  and  the  frequency  response-fucntions.  Another advantage  with  Abaqus  is  that  the  solver  already  includes  three  of  the  correlation  models  which therefore simplify the verification of the new tool. Finally,  a  simulation  study  is  carried  out  in  order  to  validate  the  MATLAB  functions  and  test  the sensitivity  to  different  correlation  models.  In  order  to  do  this,  the  sound  pressure  field  is  to  be reasonable  approximated  and  therefore  data  from  the  database  ESDU  (acronym  of  Engineering Sciences Data Unit) is used that predicts sound pressure fields for different flight envelopes. In the simulation study all correlation models are compared to TBL due to its sound pressure and here it can be seen that fully correlated loads fails to predict response due to certain modes. On the other hand, the MCL model increases this accuracy for low Mach numbers and even more for high Mach numbers  due  to  its  velocity  dependence.  The  diffuse  model,  which  is  supposed  to  imitate  a  real pressure chamber load, is often believed to be conservative but in this study it can be seen that this is not always the case.