Numerical study of the influence of quadrotor blade parameters on aerodynamic noise generation

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the effect of variation of the parameters of a small-sized quadrotor blade on the level of aerodynamic noise and its frequency spectrum. There is a certain discrepancy between the calculated and experimental data available today. The reason for this is that the study of quadrotor rotor noise is carried out using various theoretical models that do not consider certain factors of sound generation or additional artificial sound sources, which result in an overestimated noise level. Therefore, there is a need for an accurate model, the calculation of which more closely matches the experimental data. In the paper below, an aerodynamic noise model is proposed to study the noise of a quadrocopter blade, which considers the non-stationarity and three-dimensionality of the sound generation and propagation process. The research methods are based on the numerical calculation of the characteristics of the near and far sound fields in the potential approximation: pressure coefficient, sound pressure level, and spectrum of the generated sound. The main parameters that were varied during numerical calculations were the rotor speed of the quadrotor, angle of attack, torsion angle, and blade position in the plane of rotation. The NASA parabolic profile was used as the test profile. Results and conclusions. The results of numerical calculations in the near field revealed three areas of sound generation above the blade surface. The first region, which is more unstable, is caused by blade torsion. The other two sound generation areas are smoothly distributed along the blade’s swing, and the pressure change level in each of them doubles. The level of generated aerodynamic noise is largely dependent on the blade speed and the distance from the blade at which the noise is calculated. The angle of attack and blade pitch have a smaller effect on the generated noise level, and in the far field, they have almost no effect on the maximum noise level. The dependence of noise on the distance to the blade, as well as the blade parameters, which were chosen similar to those studied by other authors, showed a fairly good agreement with the calculations of these authors and with experimental studies. Because of aerodynamic calculations and noise generation around the quadrotor blade using ANSYS software, it was found that sound vibrations occur during the flow around the blade tip, with a level of 120 dB in the immediate vicinity of the blade surface. Calculations using a 3D model of the propeller confirmed that the volume reached 80 dB at the nearest reference point, which closely matches the data from the calculation based on the potential model and the experimental data.

Keywords

• aerodynamic noise
• numerical methods
• quadrocopter