High-fidelity numerical analysis of ducted propeller aerodynamics and acoustics

This paper presents the high-fidelity numerical simulation and analysis of ducted/un-ducted propeller aerodynamics and acoustics. High-fidelity CFD simulations at several operating conditions were performed using the in-house HMB3 solver and were validated against experiments and lower-order methods. Superior performance of the ducted propeller at lower advance ratios or in hover conditions was verified. Near-field acoustics was then extracted directly from the CFD simulations. Far-field acoustics was also calculated based on the FW-H equations taking the CFD results as inputs. The noise reduction, directivity changes, and fly-by signals are quantitatively presented and analysed