CFD/Computational Aeroacoustics Services

Techsburg has over 20 years of experience providing design, analysis, and testing services for major civil and military aviation programs. Through these programs, Techsburg has developed a wealth of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) expertise for varied applications such as eVTOL aircraft, open rotor and ducted fan installations, low-noise propulsors, aerodynamic and acoustic interactions in multirotor vehicles, atmospheric turbulence ingestion, and gas turbine aerodynamics.

Since 2020, Techsburg has focused on applying Dassault Systemes' PowerFLOW lattice-Boltzmann method (LBM) CFD solver to aerodynamic/aeroacoustic problems in the aviation industry. This ultra-high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics suite directly solves large-scale turbulence and acoustic propagation, without the numerical dissipation/dispersion that plague traditional unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) solvers (and at a small fraction of the computational cost of scale-resolving Navier-Stokes DES/LES solvers). Techsburg (with world-class acoustic signal processing expertise provided by AVEC, Inc) uses PowerFLOW as a ‘Virtual Flight Test’ or ‘Virtual Wind Tunnel’ to characterize aircraft community noise and/or detectability, identify acoustic sources/problem areas, resolve complex turbulent flow interactions, and evaluate advanced low-noise technologies at greatly reduced cost versus building and testing physical aircraft models. That said, CFD simulations are only as good as their experimental validation, which is why most Techsburg computational aeroacoustics activities have been backed up by in-house experimental validation and published whenever possible.

In addition to its status as the premier computational aeroacoustics solver, PowerFLOW is also ideally suited to the simulation of any unsteady, turbulent flow field, a capability which Techsburg has applied to successfully predict gas turbine exhaust system performance at off-design conditions. Techsburg operates an in-house HPC cluster dedicated to PowerFLOW simulations (as a DCAA-audited cost center), and this capability allows us to handle sensitive/proprietary/export-controlled geometries and results