An Acoustic Excitation System for the Generation of Turbomachinery Specific Sound Fields: Part I — Design and Methodology

A strong focus in the development of modern aircraft engines is the reduction of the engine tonal core noise. For the development of efficient noise reduction techniques, a detailed understanding of the sound transmission throughout all turbomachinery components of the engine is mandatory. In this paper an excitation system is developed to generate turbomachinery-specific sound fields by controlling their circumferential and radial mode order. The excitation system consists of two rows of eight loudspeakers distributed circumferentially around the outer duct wall. This paper gives a detailed description of the analytically- and numerically-supported design methodology of an optimized excitation system, as well as an optimized microphone array mounted flush with the outer duct wall. A sensitivity analysis of the loudspeaker array and of the microphone array with respect to distance and frequency is then carried out numerically. To analyze the microphone signals and to deconstruct the propagating sound field into its modal components, a Radial Mode Analysis (RMA) is carried out. To ensure high-quality RMA results, the axial distribution of the microphones is optimized with respect to the condition number of the array’s transfer matrix. The procedure explained in this paper shall help guide the development of acoustic excitation and microphone array systems for experiments to better understand sound propagation in turbomachinery and flow ducts.