Computational Aeroacoustic Investigation of Airfoil Cascades

At moderate Reynolds numbers and angles of attack, the Laminar Boundary Layer (LBL) becomes unstable on the surface of airfoils, and causes periodic vortex shedding, which means undesired tonal peaks in the spectrum of the emitted aeroacoustic noise along with increased vibration and decreased aerodynamic performance. In the past, numerous research campaigns focused on the LBL vortex shedding, including measurements and numerical simulations as well. The results of these investigation showed that, the formation of the LBL instability related to the presence of the laminar separation bubble. It was also shown that, the spectrum of the emitted noise has a multitonal behavior, and the scaling of the mean frequency with the free stream velocity has a ladder structure. Based on these results, the LBL instability is a complex phenomenon; however, in the preliminary design of axial flow turbomachines the prediction of the frequency of the vortex shedding is essential, therefore the use of semi-empirical formulas is usual to achieve this goal. The previous researches mostly focused on separated airfoils, however, in case of turbomachines, the blades form a cascade, which can significantly affect the aerodynamic of the airfoils, i.e. it can affect the behavior of the LBL instability as well. According to this, in the present paper the LBL instability of NACA 0012 cascades are investigated, using 2D computational fluid mechanics and aeroacoustics simulations. The investigation involves the variation of the angle of attack, the chord based Reynolds-number and the spacing. The results are compared to the semi-empirical Brooks-Pope-Marcolini model