Methodology for Predicting Flow Induced Noise in Axial Fans through Aero Vibro-Acoustics (AVA)

Nowadays, sound comfort has become more and more important in residential houses. Home appliance is one of the main sources of indoor noise and so noise emission appears to be a distinctive feature for the selection of the home appliances. Fans are one of the main sources of noise in most of the home appliances like Refrigerators, Dishwashers, Ovens, Dryers etc. This requires an emphasis to develop a mechanism for understanding the Fan Noise in early stage of product development process and CAE Simulations appear to be better tool to predict, investigate and also assist to mitigate the Fan noise issues. The Objective of this paper is to present a multidisciplinary computational approach developed to predict Fan noise. This methodology is based on coupling of an unsteady Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) code and Vibro-acoustics (NVH) solver to calculate the Flow induced Noise and its propagation. Also, this paper explains different CFD and NVH modeling techniques and solving approaches to capture complex interaction between fluid and Fan structure for fan noise prediction. This methodology was further validated with experimental data as per ISO 10302-1 standards achieving good correlation which implies good accuracy. Keywords: Fan Noise, Aero-Vibro-Acoustics, AVA, CFD, NVH