A segregated finite volume - spectral element method for aeroacoustic problems

We propose a segregated Finite Volume (FV) - Spectral Element Method (SEM) for modelling aeroacoustic phenomena based on the Lighthill's acoustic analogy. First the fluid solution is computed employing a FV method. Then, the sound source term is projected onto the acoustic grid and the inhomogeneous Lighthill's wave equation is solved employing the SEM. The novel projection method computes offline the intersections between the acoustic and the fluid grids in order to preserve the accuracy. The proposed intersection algorithm is shown to be robust, scalable and able to efficiently compute the geometric intersection of arbitrary polyhedral elements. We then analyse the properties of the projection error and we numerically assess the obtained theoretical estimates. Finally, we address two relevant aeroacoustic benchmarks, namely the corotating vortex pair and the noise induced by a laminar flow around a squared cylinder, to demonstrate in practice the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The flow computations are performed with OpenFOAM , an open-source finite volume library, while the inhomogeneous Lighthill's wave equation is solved with SPEED, an open-source spectral element library.