Trailing-edge noise on a high-lift wing section
Unsteady RANS on a 12M-cell hybrid mesh to resolve trailing-edge vortex shedding, coupled to an acoustic analogy for far-field tonal noise prediction.
Problem
A high-lift wing section was generating tonal trailing-edge noise outside the predicted band, threatening a certification acoustic limit. The client needed a physics-based prediction, not a correlation-based estimate, to locate the mechanism and test geometry fixes before a wind-tunnel slot came free.
Approach
We ran unsteady RANS (SST) on a 12M-cell hybrid mesh with y+ below 1 at the wall, resolving the boundary-layer instability feeding the trailing-edge shedding. Near-field unsteady pressure was propagated to the far field with a permeable-surface Ffowcs Williams–Hawkings acoustic analogy, the same formulation used across the aeroacoustics literature for airframe noise.
Outcome
The simulation reproduced the tonal peak within the frequency band flagged in early tests and identified the shedding mechanism, allowing a trailing-edge geometry change to be screened computationally before committing tunnel time.
// CANONICAL REFERENCES
The literature behind this run
- Ffowcs Williams, J. E. & Hawkings, D. L. (1969). Sound Generation by Turbulence and Surfaces in Arbitrary Motion. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 264(1151)
- Brooks, T. F., Pope, D. S. & Marcolini, M. A. (1989). Airfoil Self-Noise and Prediction. NASA Reference Publication 1218
- Wang, M. & Moin, P. (2000). Computation of Trailing-Edge Flow and Noise Using Large-Eddy Simulation. AIAA Journal, 38(12)
These are the foundational papers the underlying method or validation approach is built on — not client deliverables. Full citation details are provided so the physics can be checked independently.
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