3rd AIAA Atmospheric Space Environments Conference AIAA 2011-4047

27 - 30 June 2011, Honolulu, Hawaii

Experimental Studies of Open Rotor Installation Effects

Michael J. Czech, The Boeing Company, Seattle, WA
and Russell H. Thomas, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA

Extended Abstract for

Invited Presentation to Special Session on Aviation Technologys Response
At the 3rd AIAA Atmospheric and Space Environment Conference
June 27-30, 2011, Honolulu, Hawaii

Open rotor propulsion technologies offer an opportunity for reducing fuel burn
due to the very high effective bypass ratio that results in increased propulsive efficiency.
Open rotor effective bypass ratio can be 25 or higher and represents a potential advantage
over even advanced ultra high bypass ratio turbofan engines. At the same time, great
challenges arise from this radically different engine architecture in terms of aircraft
system integration. The propulsion airframe aeroacoustic (PAA) effects of integration
are one of those key challenges. Total installed noise, open rotor noise including
integration effects, can be impacted by angle of attack, spacing between rotors and
airframe elements, flow effects from wake ingestion or distortion from the airframe
elements and several other parameters that generally depend on the aircraft configuration.
In general, these effects increase noise compared to that of an isolated open rotor. This
inter-relationship of the aerodynamic and aeroacoustic system integration effects is
particularly important to enable future application. Furthermore, innovative integration
and advanced technology may also offer the possibility of mitigating these usually
negative aeroacoustic effects for a total aircraft system noise reduction. Understanding of
these installation effects is essential to be able to assess the aircraft system benefits and to
develop technology and approaches to achieve the best aircraft system benefits possible.
An extensive model scale test campaign was conducted to investigate a broad
range of these open rotor installation effects for both a conventional and an
unconventional airframe. The conventional airframe was patterned after a modern twin-
engine aircraft configuration. The unconventional airframe was a hybrid wing body
aircraft concept. The contra-rotating, eight by eight, open rotor used in this experiment
was legacy technology from the 1980s flight test project.
The experimental campaign was conducted in the Boeing Low Speed
Aeroacoustic Facility (LSAF), shown in Figure 1. A 9 by 12 ft open jet is used to
produce the forward flight simulation with a maximum Mach number of 0.25 for this
experimental setup. Figure 1 shows the basic setup for this campaign with the airframe
attached from the overhead structure and the open rotor rig attached on a strut from
below the open jet. LSAF installed specially designed modifications for efficient
positioning of the airframe relative to the open rotor. The airframe was traversed
remotely relative to the fixed open rotor rig providing for the investigation of a large
number of installation positions. Eight positions around the main wing of the
conventional airframe and eleven positions above the hybrid wing body airframe were
documented.
Figure 2 shows a typical spectrum of the open rotor. In this case, the forward and
aft blade rows were run intentionally at slightly different speeds. This allows the engine

Copyright 2011 by The Boeing Company. Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., with permission.
order tones from each blade row to be identified. The blade passage tone of each row, 8th
engine order, is the first higher-level tones evident in the spectrum. The second set of
tones is identified at the 16th engine order, second blade passage, with an extra tone, an
interaction tone, in between the forward and aft tones. Figure 3 shows how the spectrum
changes for one typical installation position. In this case, the open rotor is positioned in
front of the conventional airframes main wing, a logical configuration. While the blade
passage tone of the forward row increases only slightly, the blade passage tone of the aft
rotor increases almost 10 decibels and all three of the tones at second blade passage also
increase 6 or more decibels. In addition, the broadband level (in between the tones)
increases by 10 decibels or more. This one example of a dramatic PAA effect can be
attributed to the upstream potential field effect of the main wing on the rotors and the
downstream interaction of the blade wakes with the main wing.
Other parameters investigated in the test campaign included forward flight
simulation Mach number, angle of attack, rotor speed, and airframe control surface
deployment. In addition, both airframes were modified for alternate configurations. The
conventional airframe was configured with both a T and a U tail while the
unconventional hybrid wing body airframe was configured with different vertical control
surfaces. An extensive instrumentation package was deployed. The acoustics were
documented with a fixed array of far field microphones, a traversing array of in-flow
microphones, an out-of-flow traversing phased array, and unsteady pressure transducers
mounted flush on the surface of the airframes. In addition, mean flow surveys were
measured with an articulating arm traversing system. The flow field surveys were
particularly valuable in documenting flow distortion effects for the various installation
positions and those created by angle of attack. This presentation will report details of the
experiment; key results obtained for open rotor installation effects and discuss future
prospects with the perspective of these results.

Figure 1 Boeing Low Speed Aeroacoustic Facility configured for open rotor installed
testing.
Figure 2 Open rotor spectrum (as a function of engine order) for isolated open rotor.

Figure 3 Open rotor spectrum with the open rotor positioned in front of conventional wing.