The detection of radiated modes from ducted fan engines

The bypass duct of an aircraft engine is a low-pass filter allowing some spinning modes to radiate outside the duct. The knowledge of the radiated modes can help in noise reduction, as well as the diagnosis of noise generation mechanisms inside the duct. We propose a nonintrusive technique using a circular microphone array outside the engine measuring the complex noise spectrum on an arc of a circle. The array is placed at various axial distances from the inlet or the exhaust of the engine. Using a model of noise radiation from the duct, an overdetermined system of linear equations is constructed for the complex amplitudes of the radial modes for a fixed circumferential mode. This system of linear equation is generally singular, indicating that the problem is ill-posed. Tikhonov regularization is employed to solve this system of equations for the unknown amplitudes of the radiated modes. An application of our mode detection technique using measured acoustic data from a circular microphone array is presented. We show that this technique can reliably detect radiated modes with the possible exception of modes very close to cut-off.