Evaluation of the Aerodynamic and Aeroacoustic Response of a Vehicle to Transient Flow Conditions

Abstract

A vehicle on the road encounters an unsteady flow due to turbulence in the natural wind, unsteady wakes of other vehicles and as a result of traversing through the stationary wakes of roadside obstacles. Unsteady effects occurring in the sideglass region of a vehicle are particularly relevant to wind noise. This is a region close to the driver and dominated by separated flow structures from the A-pillar and door mirrors, which are sensitive to unsteadiness in the onset flow. Since the sideglass region is of particular aeroacoustic importance, the paper seeks to determine what impact these unsteady effects have on the sources of aeroacoustic noise as measured inside the passenger compartment, in addition to the flow structures in this region. Data presented were obtained during on-road measurement campaigns using two instrumented vehicles, as well as from aeroacoustic wind tunnel tests. Conventional admittance functions relating oncoming flow yaw angle to cabin noise response are generally not suitable due to the non-linear steady state characteristics obtained in the wind tunnel, i.e. the cabin noise does not vary with yaw angle in a linear fashion under steady-state conditions. Therefore two alternative approaches were used based on instantaneous conditions to determine a quasi-steady predicted cabin noise time-history. These techniques demonstrated that the cabin noise response to oncoming flow unsteadiness remained generally quasi-steady up to fluctuation frequencies of approximately 2 to 5 Hz, where above this smaller flow scales have a progressively smaller impact on cabin noise fluctuations. Therefore, with a measurement of both the cabin noise in the steady environment of the wind tunnel and the unsteady onset flow conditions, the fluctuations (and thus the modulation) of the wind noise under these unsteady conditions is able to be predicted.