Abstract
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 research have been carried out on predicting the noise because of the difficulty in obtaining detailed information about the flow field and casing effects on noise radiation. The objective of this study is to understand the generation mechanism of sound and to develop a prediction method for the unsteady flow field and the acoustic pressure field of a centrifugal fan. We assume that the impeller rotates with a constant angular velocity and the flow field of 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 by the unsteady Bernoulli equation. Lowsons method is used to predict the acoustic source. In order to compare the experimental data, a centrifugal impeller and wedge introduced by Weidemann are used in the numerical calculation and the results are compared with the experimental data. Reasonable results are obtained not only for the peak frequencies but also for the amplitudes of the tonal.