원심홴의 설계 변수가 홴의 성능과 소음에 미치는 영향의 수치적 연구

A Numerical Study of the Effects of Design Parameter upon Fan Performance and Noise

Centrifugal fans are widely used and the noise generated by these machines causes one of the most serious problems. In general, the centrifugal fan noise is often dominated by tones at BPF(blade passage frequency) and its higher harmonics. This is a consequence of the strong interaction between the flow discharged from the impeller and the cutoff in the casing. However, only a few researches have been carried out on predicting the noise due to the difficulty in obtaining detailed information about the flow field and casing effects on noise radiation. The objective of this study is to develop a prediction method for the unsteady flow field and the acoustic pressure field of a centrifugal fan and to calculate the effects of rotating velocity, flow rate, cut-off distance and the number of blades and its effects on the noise of the fan. We assume that the impeller rotates with a constant angular velocity and the flow field around the impeller is incompressible and inviscid. So, a discrete vortex method (DVM) is used to model the centrifugal fan and to calculate the flow field. The force of each element on the blade is calculated with the unsteady Bernoulli equation. Lowson's method is used to predict the acoustic source. The cut-off distance is the most important factor effecting the noise generation. Acoustic pressure is proportional to 2.8, which shows the same scaling index as the experimental result. In this paper, the cut-off distance is found to be the dominant parameter offecting the acoustic pressure.