Aeroacoustic measurements for an axial fan in a non-anechoic environment

Determination of the aeroacoustic emission from an axial fan in a non-anechoic environment is a challenging experimental task given ambient noise and acoustic reflections from surrounding objects. Successful strategies to address this task for a representative nine and three blade fan are presented. An array consisting of ten microphones was constructed and placed in the upstream region of the axial fans to measure the fan acoustic signature at ten distinct locations. A novel delay and sum (DS) beamforming technique (that allows precise time delays to be established by the use of cross correlation techniques) was applied to the microphone outputs in order to separate the fans' acoustic emissions from the ambient noise and reflections from the facility walls. A numerical simulation was developed to represent the experimental facility and the measurements. The numerical simulation indicated that the extraneous noise can be satisfactorily separated from the fan noise using the array measurements and post processing the acoustic data with the present DS beamforming technique.