Investigation of the Acoustic Surface Power on a Cooling Fan Using the Mesh Morpher Optimizer 2019-01-0833

A cooling fan is an essential device of the engine cooling system which is used to remove the heat generated inside the engine from the system. An essential element for successful fan designs is to evaluate the pressure over the fan blade since it can generate annoying noices, which have a negative impact on the fan’s performance and on the environment. Reducing the acoustic surface power will assist in building improved designs that comply with standards and regulations in achieving a more quiet environment. The usage of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), with support of mesh morphing, can provide simulation study for optimizing the shape of a fan blade to reduce the aeroacoustic effects. The investigation process will assist in examining and analyzing the acoustic performance of the prototype, impact of different parameters, and make a solid judgement about the model performance for improvement and optimization.

This paper proposes a new strategy in evaluating the pressure distribution over a fan blade. CFD techniques and optimization methodology were applied to improve the acoustic surface power distribution over a cooling fan’s blade. ANSYS Fluent was used to support this strategy to optimize the base model in combining the mesh morphing and the optimization techniques to provide a quick evaluation of the acoustic’s performance of the fan model. The Mesh Morpher Optimizer (MMO) in ANSYS Fluent was applied in conjunction with SIMPLEX and Powell’s broadband acoustic modeling. Consequently, the design process of a cooling fan with high performance can be reasonably practicable and fairly inexpensive. Also, this approach can be considered as one of the reasonable ways to reduce the design cost and time to leverage the total capital because time is a key factor in the manufacturing process. The surface acoustic power on the base model and end models using the SIMPLEX and Powell methods showed improvement on the performnace of cooling fan. The objective function with the SIMPLEX model was found to achieve faster convergence (less design stages) in comparison to the Powell’s model.