Prediction of Pressure Fluctuation on a Vehicle by Large Eddy Simulation

The objective of this study is to predict accurately interior aeroacoustics noise of a car for a wide range of frequency between 100 Hz and 4 kHz. One-way coupled simulations of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), structural analysis and acoustical analysis were performed to predict interior aeroacoustics noise. We predicted pressure fluctuations on the outer surfaces of a test car by computing unsteady flow around the car as the first step. Secondary, the predicted pressure fluctuations were fed to the subsequent structural analysis to predict vibration accelerations on the inner surfaces of the test car. Finally, acoustical analysis was performed to predict sound fields in the test car by giving vibration accelerations computed by the structural analysis as the boundary conditions. In this paper, we focus on the unsteady flow computations, which is the first step of the coupled simulations. Large Eddy Simulation (LES) was performed to predict the pressure fluctuations on the outer surfaces of the test car. We used the computational mesh composed of approximately 5 billion hexahedral grids with a spatial resolution of 1.5 mm in the streamwise and spanwise directions to resolve the dynamics of the small vortices in the turbulence boundary layer. Predicted and measured pressure fluctuation at several sampling points on the surface of the test car were compared and they matched well in a wide range of frequency up to 2 kHz.