"Reducing aircraft noise emission is a priority for the European aviation sector, since both community and occupancy noises have significant environmental impact and constrain airport activities. In addition there is a strong interplay between low-noise technologies, fuel efficiency and air pollution.
Computer simulations play a crucial role in the acoustic design of aircraft airframes and engines, by selecting novel concepts, optimizing final designs, and avoiding costly flight and static tests. But current computational tools are either unable or too inefficient to perform large acoustic simulations over the complete frequency range and taking into account the full geometrical and physical complexity.
Further improvements in computational aero-acoustics will require novel numerical schemes, better integration with other engineering design tools, and also stronger alignment with the needs of private sector end-users. To achieve this, LMS and ISVR are leading this training and research program, together with Rolls-Royce as associated partner. The research activities will cover high-order methods, novel techniques for accurate geometry description, and extensions of the Boundary Element methods. These techniques will be used for the acoustic design of nacelles and Auxiliary Power Units (APU) which feature complex geometries and flow configurations, and for predicting installation effects (acoustic interaction between the engine and the wing) which currently requires vast computational resources.
This research program is supported by a range of courses that combines the complementary expertise of the project partners (aero-acoustics, computational methods, CAD methods, aircraft noise). Such a combination of multi-disciplinary training activities is currently not available elsewhere, but is needed to develop researchers with the appropriate blend of expertise to support the future evolutions of aircraft noise predictions."