Aeroacoustic and Aerodynamic Investigation of a Wingtip-Mounted Tractor Propeller

Abstract

The wingtip-mounted propeller configuration is widely used in many aircraft, particularly owing to the emergence of urban air mobility. This paper focuses on analyzing the aeroacoustic properties of a wingtip-mounted tractor propeller by understanding the aerodynamic interaction between the two geometric components. Computational fluid dynamics based on Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations were used to calculate the flow field and aerodynamic loads on a wingtip-mounted propeller model, and the results were compared with experimental data for validation. The resulting surface pressure was fed as input data for the acoustic analysis performed using a Ffowcs Williams–Hawkings equation-based acoustic solver at multiple angles of attack. The presence of the wing significantly increased the propeller noise along the rotational axis. With increasing angle of attack, the propeller noise increased further. By contrast, the wing noise decreased with the angle of attack due to propeller wake dissipation, leading to only a small increase in the maximum total noise.