The effect of the vibrissa shaped cylinder on the aeolian tone mitigation

This paper studies vibrissa shaped cylinder as a passive control method for reducing the aerodynamic noise of the flow past a cylinder. One elliptical cylinder and a circular cylinder are also investigated for comparison. The far-field noise results show that compared with the circular cylinder case, the tonal peak almost disappears in the vibrissa shaped cylinder case and the sound pressure level (SPL) could be reduced by about 20dB at Re"≈" 36,000. The elliptical cylinder only shows a slight SPL reduction by about 4 dB with a shift in the tonal peak frequency from St=0.2 to St=0.36. Furthermore, some noticeable variations occur in the noise directivity pattern for the vibrissa shaped cylinder case. The shift in the tonal peak frequency, the reduction in noise and modifications in the noise directivity are related to the changing and breakdown of the vortex shedding caused by the interference with the elliptical and vibrissa shaped cylinder surfaces. The PIV experiments are conducted to the three cases for the flow field information to further understand the mechanism of the noise reduction caused by the vibrissa shaped cylinder and the elliptical cylinder.