Development of a new free wake model considering a blade–vane interaction for a low noise axial fan planform optimization

Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) is an essential part for low noise axial fan design since various parameters, such as flow rate, efficiency, noise etc., should be considered. For this reason, Response Surface Method (RSM) design technique is adopted as an axial fan design method. RSM has an advantage of choosing objective functions and constraint conditions unrestrictedly on a design space. However, RSM needs a lot of independent variables to construct a proper response surface. Thus an efficient and accurate flow analysis tool is indispensable for optimization. In an axial fan, the discrete (commonly called Blade-Passage-Frequency) components are usually dominant in the noise spectrum. Especially the blade–guide vane interaction is one of most important noise sources. In order to predict this noise component efficiently at the design stage, a new free wake model named Finite Vortex Element (FVE) is devised to simulate this blade–guide vane interaction, which is very difficult to analyze numerically in a conventional free wake model. In this new free wake model, the blade–wake–guide vane interaction is described by cutting a vortex filament when the filament collides with a guide vane. This FVE model is compared with a conventional curved vortex methodology and verified by a comparison with measured data to show its effectiveness and validity. Then FVE model is coupled with RSM to implement a low noise axial fan blade optimization. Using this method, a reduction of 8 dB(A) at 2 m from fan hub in the overall noise level is achieved while the flow rate and the efficiency are maintained as the values of the baseline blade, which implies that FVE wake model coupled with RSM is very effective methodology for MDO problems such as a low noise axial fan design.