Modeling of combustion noise in helicopter engines

The growth of air traffic at the vicinity of areas at high population density imposes to make quieter aircrafts on aeronautical manufacturers.The engine noise is one of the major contributors to the overall sound levels. Furthermore, the combustion is known to be responsible for a broadband noise generation at low-frequency. The combustion noise can be put into two main mechanisms. The first one is the emission of sound pulses by the unsteady heat release of the combustion process and is called the direct combustion noise. The second one is the generation of acoustic waves within the turbine stages by the acceleration of the temperature inhomogeneities and vorticity waves induced by the combustion and the turbulent flow within the combustor. This noise is the indirect combustion noise. These mechanisms were fully investigated in academic cases using experimental, analytical and numerical approaches contrary to the combustion noise within real engines. In this work, a hybrid approach called CONOCHAIN and based on LES of combustion chamber and an analytical disk theory to compute the combustion noise in a real turboshaft engine is evaluated. The predicted noise levels are compared with the experimental results obtained from a TURBOMECA engine in the framework of TEENI project (European project FP7) and analysed in this work where a turboshaft engine was instrumented to locate and identify the broadband noise sources. Two LES of a single sector of the TEENI combustion chamber representative of two experimental operating points are performed as well as a LES of the full-scale combustor at high power. The unsteady fields provided by the LES are used to compute direct and indirect combustion noise within the turbine stages in both cases and compared with the experimental results