One-step direct aeroacoustic simulation using space-time conservation element and solution element method

Abstract

One‐step direct aeroacoustic simulation (DAS) has received attention from aerospace and mechanical high‐pressure fluid‐moving system manufacturers for quite some time. They aim to simulate the unsteady flow and acoustic field in the duct simultaneously in order to investigate the aeroacoustic generation mechanisms. Because of the large length and energy scale disparities between the acoustic far field and the aerodynamic near field, highly accurate and high‐resolution simulation scheme is required. This involves the use of high order compact finite difference and time advancement schemes in simulation. However, in this situation, large buffer zones are always needed to suppress the spurious numerical waves emanating from computational boundaries. This further increases the computational resources to yield accurate results. On the other hand, for such problem as supersonic jet noise, the numerical scheme should be able to resolve both strong shock waves and weak acoustic waves simultaneously. Usually numerical aeroa‐coustic scheme that is good for low Mach number flow is not able to give satisfactory simulation results for shock wave. Therefore, the aeroacoustic research community has been looking for a more efficient one‐step DAS scheme that has the comparable accuracy to the finite‐difference approach with smaller buffer regions, yet is able to give accurate solutions from subsonic to supersonic flows. The conservation element and solution element (CE/SE) scheme is one of the possible schemes satisfying the above requirements. This paper aims to report the development of a CE/SE scheme for one‐step DAS and illustrate its robustness and effectiveness with two selected benchmark problems.