A study on propeller noise source localization in a cavitation tunnel

Localizing noise sources in cavitation experiments is an important research subject along with predicting noise levels. A cavitation tunnel propeller noise localization method is presented. Propeller noise measurement experiments were performed in the MOERI cavitation tunnel. To create cavitating conditions, a wake-generating dummy body was devised. In addition, 10 hydrophones were put inside a wing-shaped casing to minimize the unexpected flow inducing noise around the hydrophones. After measuring both of the noises of the rotating propeller behind the dummy body and acoustic signals transmitted by a virtual source, the data were processed via three objective functions based on the ideas of matched field processing and source strength estimation to localize noises on the propeller plane. In this paper, the measured noise analysis and the localization results are presented. Through the experiments and the analysis, it was found that the source localization methods that have been used in shallow water applications could be successfully adapted to the cavitation tunnel experiments.