Vibroacoustic simulations with non-homogeneous TBL excitations: Synthesis of wall pressure fields with the Continuously-varying Uncorrelated Wall Plane Waves approach

A numerical method is presented to predict the vibro-acoustic response of a vibrating structure excited by a spatially inhomogeneous turbulent boundary layer(TBL). It is based on the synthesis of different realizations of the random pressure fluctuations that can be introduced as loadings of a vibro-acoustic model (such as a finite element model). To generate the pressures of the non-homogeneous turbulent boundary layer, the Uncorrelated Wall Plane Wave(UWPW) approach used so far for homogeneous TBL is extended. On a first step, this extension is based on a decomposition of the excited surface into sub-areas and on the averaged TBL parameters for each sub-area. In a second step, it consists in taking into account the interaction between the sub-areas and a refinement of the sub-area decomposition. This leads to the Continuously-varying Uncorrelated Wall Plane Waves (C-UWPW) approach. The accuracy of the proposed approach is investigated on a panel with a varying thickness and excited by a growing TBL triggered at one edge of the plate. The interests of the proposed approach in terms of accuracy and computation time are discussed. Finally, an illustration of the proposed approach to predict the radiated noise from a blade immersed in a water flow is proposed.