Within the overarching area of airplane noise, landing gear noise has been proven to be a major contributor to airframe noise. Despite a large focus given to it by past research work, landing gear noise investigations have continuously failed to include landing lights, completely disregarding their potential for seriously altering the landing gear wake structure and overall noise signature. This thesis is one of the first studies to focus on the effect of landing light orientation on landing gear wake and landing gear noise. Pressure fluctuations in the wake of a simplified single light landing gear model are investigated experimentally for several freestream velocities and at various elevations of measurement plane. The effect of the distance between the light and the landing gear strut is also investigated. Three-dimensional flow is found in the wake at the center, or zero elevation, plane. This three-dimensionality is found to be much weaker at the highest elevation from the light, where the wake is found to be primarily two-dimensional. The nature of the transition region between the three-dimensional flow and two-dimensional flow is not investigated, but it is acknowledged that a transition region exists. Complex flow behaviour leading to a wake width larger than twice the size of the light-strut assembly width is found to be present at the zero elevation, and phase-locked PIV imaging is unable to capture any periodic motion within the wake at this elevation. In contrast, the wake at the highest elevation is found to resemble the flow in the wake of circular cylinders, and phase-locked PIV imaging at this elevation clearly captures an alternate vortex shedding scheme. Due to this difference in wake structures, the periodicity at the highest elevation is found to be stronger than that observed at the zero elevation. Changes in light-strut spacing are found to inversely affect the strength of the periodicity in the wake, as larger spacing is linked to greater influence of three-dimensionality, and therefore a weaker periodicity. Changes in light-strut spacing are also found to be inversely related to the oscillation frequency of the periodicity, with the cause for this relationship possibly explained by the wider wake at increased spacing. It is found that the oscillation frequency of periodicity in the single light landing gear wake is consistently in the Strouhal number range of St=0.16-0.18 for all light-strut spacing distances, freestream velocities, and elevations. The flow around the light-strut assembly is therefore characterized as modulated flow around a cylindrical strut because alternate vortex shedding is dominant except for a slight region where the light acts to generate three-dimensionality, and because the oscillation frequency is near that of vortex shedding from a circular cylinder, St=0.19. The wakes of the single light landing gear and two-light landing gear models are compared, but neither design can be supported as quieter than the other at this time due to the unknown amount of vertical radiation from the landing gear wakes. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

A novel concept in noise control devices for landing gears is presented. These devices consist of elastic membranes creating a fairing around the major noise sources. The purpose of these devices is to reduce wake interactions and to hide components from the flow, thus, reducing the noise emission. The design of these fairings was focused on the major noise sources identified in a 777 main landing gear. To find the major noise sources, an extensive noise source identification process was performed using phased arrays. To this end, phased array technologies were developed and a 26%-scale 777 main landing gear model was tested at the Virginia Tech Stability Wind Tunnel. Since phased array technologies present some issues leading to misinterpretation of results and inaccuracy in determining actual levels, a new approach to the deconvolution of acoustic sources has been developed. The goal of this post-processing is to "simplify" the beamforming output by suppressing the sidelobes and reducing the sources mainlobe to a small number of points that accurately identify the noise sources position and their actual levels. To this end, the beamforming output is modeled as a superposition of "complex" point spread functions and a nonlinear system of equations is posted. Such system is solved using a new 2-step procedure. In the first step an approximated linear problem is solved, while in the second step an optimization is performed over the nonzero values obtained in the previous step. The solution to this system of equations renders the sources position and amplitude. The technique is called: noise source Localization and Optimization of Array Results (LORE). Numerical simulations as well as sample experimental results are shown for the proposed post-processing. / Ph. D.

An aeroacoustic study was conducted on a 26%-scale Boeing 777 main landing gear in the Virginia Tech (VT) Anechoic Stability Wind Tunnel. The VT Anechoic Stability Wind Tunnel allowed noise measurements to be carried out using both a 63-elements microphone phased array and a linear array of 15 microphones. The noise sources were identified from the flyover view under various flow speeds and the phased array positioned in both the near and far-field. The directivity pattern of the landing gear was determined using the linear array of microphones. The effectiveness of 4 passive noise control devices was evaluated. The 26%-scale model tested was a faithful reproduction of the full-scale landing gear and included most of the full-scale details with accuracy down to 3 mm. The same landing gear model was previously tested in the original hard-walled configuration of the VT tunnel with the same phased array mounted on the wall of the test section, i.e. near-field position. Thus, the new anechoic configuration of the VT wind tunnel offered a unique opportunity to directly compare, using the same gear model and phased array instrumentation, data collected in hard-walled and semi-anechoic test sections. The main objectives of the present work were (i) to evaluate the validity of conducting aeroacoustic studies in non-acoustically treated, hard-walled wind tunnels, (ii) to test the effectiveness of various streamlining devices (passive noise control) at different flyover locations, and (iii) to assess if phased array measurements can be used to estimate noise reduction. As expected, the results from this work show that a reduction of the background noise (e.g. anechoic configuration) leads to significantly cleaner beamforming maps and allows one to locate noise sources that would not be identified otherwise. By using the integrated spectra for the baseline landing gear, it was found that in the hard-walled test section the levels of the landing gear noise were overestimated. Phased array measurements in the near and far-field positions were also compared in the anechoic configuration. The results showed that straight under the gear, near-field measurements located only the lower-truck noise sources, i.e. noise components located behind the truck were shielded. It was thus demonstrated that near-field, phased-array measurements of the landing gear noise straight under the gear are not suitable. The array was also placed in the far-field, on the rear-arc of the landing gear. From this position, other noise sources such as the strut could be identified. This result demonstrated that noise from the landing gear on the flyover path cannot be characterized by only taking phased array measurement right under the gear. The noise reduction potential of various streamlining devices was estimated from phased array measurements (by integrating the beamforming maps) and using the linear array of individually calibrated microphones. Comparison of the two approaches showed that the reductions estimated from the phased array and a single microphone were in good agreement in the far-field. However, it was found that in the near-field, straight under the gear, phased array measurements greatly overestimate the attenuation. / Master of Science