In many practical applications involving turbulent flows, noise does not have any distinct tones, and the sound energy is continuously distributed over a broad range of frequencies. In those situations involving broadband noise , statistical turbulence quantities readily computable from RANS equations can be utilized, in conjunction with semi-empirical correlations and Lighthill’s acoustic analogy, to shed some light on the source of broadband noise.

Ansys Fluent offers several such source models that enable you to quantify the local contribution (per unit surface area or volume) to the total acoustic power generated by the flow. They include the following:

Considering that one would ultimately want to come up with some measures to mitigate the noise generated by the flow in question, the source models can be employed to extract useful diagnostics on the noise source to determine which portion of the flow is primarily responsible for the noise generation. Note, however, that these source models do not predict the sound at receivers.

Unlike the direct method and the FW-H integral method, the broadband noise source models do not require transient solutions to any governing fluid dynamics equations. All source models require what typical RANS models would provide, such as the mean velocity field, turbulent kinetic energy ( ) and the dissipation rate ( ). Therefore, the use of broadband noise source models requires the least computational resources.