Aeroacoustic Analysis of Propellers Operating in Both Hovering and Edgewise Flow Conditions using A GPU-Accelerated Vortex Particle Method Solver

With the increasing trends in Urban Air Mobility (UAM) eVTOL concept, challenging flight conditions of eVTOL tiltrotor aircraft are more likely to occur, such as non-axial conditions in addition to axial ones. This study investigates the aerodynamic and aeroacoustic performance of rotors operating in both non-axial (edgewise) and hovering conditions using mid-fidelity Vortex Particle Method (VPM) CFD calculations. As a cost-effective VPM tool, the whirl solver coupled with 3D source and doublet panel formulation is formulated using Python JAX implementation, and it is applied to the rotors operating in the aforementioned hovering and edgewise flow conditions. The aerodynamic and tonal noise results are validated using the existing experimental data and a known open-source DUST VPM solver to show the capabilities of the newly formulated solver. Results show that the VPM tools and the whirl solver estimate both the aerodynamic and tonal noise performance of the rotors with very good accuracy.