Alongside interior design, high quality air supply, in-flight service, noise pollution plays a major role defining passenger comfort in aircraft cabins. Flow induced noise generated by parts and subsystems of the aircraft ventilation system is relevant for defining comfort for aircraft passengers and cabin crews, but also for ground crews. Such noise can be generated for example by:

• Flow through parts of the air generation device (pack)
• Flow through mixing and recirculation devices
• Fans
• Flow through final air distribution devices (cabin air outlets)

State of the art CFD methods such as LES and DES are gaining more importance in the prediction of noise and designing of the aforementioned systems. Efficient generation of high quality meshes, as required by these CFD methods and the rapid drop of computing power costs lead to an increased substitution of often expensive acoustic tests by CFD simulations. The relatively low costs and fast turnaround times make CFD methods especially attractive in earlier design phases for these kinds of problems.

Modern automatic optimisation methods have been employed by ICON in conjunction with CFD aero-acoustic prediction methods in order to further bring down turnaround times and increase performance of aircraft ventilation system parts.

For further information about our CAA expertise please refer to EXPERTISE>AERO-ACOUSTICS.