A study on the acoustic loads prediction of flight vehicle using computational fluid dynamics-empirical hybrid method

This paper performed the prediction of the acoustic loads applied to the surface of the flight vehicle during flight. Acoustic loads during flight arise from the pressure fluctuations on the surface of body. The conventional method of predicting the acoustic loads in flight uses semi-empirical method derived from theoretical and experimental results. However, there is a limit in obtaining the flow characteristics and the boundary layer parameters of the flight vehicle which are used as the input values of the empirical equation through experiments. Therefore, in this paper, we use the hybrid method which combines the results of CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) with semi-empirical methods to predict the acoustic loads acting on flight vehicle during flight. For the flight vehicle with cone-cylinder-flare shape, acoustic loads were estimated for the subsonic, transonic, supersonic, and Max-q (Maximum dynamic pressure) condition flight. For the hybrid method, two kind of boundary layer edge estimation methods based on CFD results are compared and the acoustic loads prediction results were compared according to empirical equations presented by various researchers.