Numerical simulation of propeller aerodynamics and tonal noise using parallel code ‘Gerbera’

The paper describes the numerical methods and the associated parallel computing code ‘Gerbera’ designed to analyse the aerodynamics and tonal noise of arbitrary aircraft propeller systems. The capabilities, robustness and accuracy of ‘Gerbera’ are demonstrated on a series of validation and verification studies, including single propellers, distributed propellers, and contra-rotating open rotor. The correct calculation of the propeller thrust characteristics and the main noise harmonics, including quite ‘subtle’ interaction effects, is shown. The presented scalability tests confirm good speed-up up to thousands of CPU cores.