Numerical Study on the Acoustic Characteristics of an Axial Fan under Rotating Stall Condition

Axial fan is an important piece of equipment in the thermal power plant that provides enough air for combustion of coal. This paper focuses on the aerodynamic noise characteristics of an axial fan in the development from stall inception to stall cells. The aerodynamic noise characteristic of monitoring region in time and frequency domains was simulated employing the large-eddy simulation (LES), with the addition of throttle setting and the Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings (FW-H) noise model. The numerical results show that, under the design condition, the acoustic pressure presents regular periodicity along with the time. The noise energy is concentrated with high energy of the fundamental frequency and high order harmonics. During the stall inception stage, the acoustic pressure amplitude starts fluctuating and discrete frequencies are increased significantly in the low frequency; among them, there are three obvious discrete frequencies: 27.66 Hz, 46.10 Hz and 64.55 Hz. On the rotating stall condition, the fluctuation of the acoustic pressure level and amplitude are more serious than that mentioned above. During the whole evolution process, the acoustic pressure peak is difficult to keep stable all the time, and a sudden increase of the peak value at the 34.5th revolution corresponds to the relative velocity’s first sudden increase at the time when the valve coefficient is 0.780.