Sound propagation from sustainable ground vehicles from aeroacoustic sources to urban noise

Sammanfattning: Transportation is the main source of environmental noise in Europe, with an estimated 125 million people affected by excessive noise levels from road traffic, causing a burden of noise related diseases and having a substantial economic impact on society. In order to reduce exposure to high levels of traffic noise, two approaches are the topic of extensive research: preventing sound from propagating from roads and railways using for example noise barriers, and reducing the sources of noise themselves. The second solution, which addresses directly the cause of the problem, requires improved design methods, with a more systematic resort to multi-functional design. Addressing cross-functions simultaneously reduces the number of design iterations and the high cost of prototyping.The work presented in this thesis aims at developing methods that can be used to design quieter vehicle concepts within a multi-functional approach, and is articulated around two main axis of research, aerodynamic sound generation and sound propagation.The first axis aims at performing an aeroacoustic analysis to predict aerodynamic sound sources. A hybrid method is used on the example of a type of submerged air inlet called a NACA duct, where the near-field flow is solved through detached eddy simulation (DES) and where the far-field acoustics is computed using the Ffowcs Williams and Hawkings integral. Results for the flow for various operating conditions are presented and validated against experimental data from the literature, with very good agreement. Far-field acoustic results are shown, exhibiting levels and components that are strongly dependent on the operating conditions. This analysis gives a framework for future aeroacoustic analysis in the project, and sets the path for the development of air inlets with improved aerodynamic and aeroacoustic characteristics.The second axis focuses on the propagation of sound from a given source, moving in an urban environment. An approximate boundary method is presented, which relies on the Kirchhoff approximation applied to the Kirchhoff-Helmholtz integral equation. Using this approximation speeds up the computational time compared to using a regular boundary element method. The resulting expression is extended to account for multiple scattering through consecutive updates of the surface pressures, and for moving sources through the introduction of a retarded time and of a Doppler shift. Validation tests for this method are presented, from simple scatterers to a more realistic configuration, showing good agreement with analytical, experimental and simulated work.