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Lighthill's Acoustic Analogy has been the dominant theory of aeroacoustics, especially jet aeroacoustics for almost fifty years. As yet, except for the u⁸ scaling law, which was derived by dimensional analysis, jet noise prediction based on the Acoustic Analogy approach has not been particularly successful. This paper examines some of the weaknesses and ambiguities in the formulation of the Acoustic Analogy theories. It is concluded that if the analogy is carried out completely, in the sense that the full wave propagation terms are retained in the propagation part of the equations of the analogy, then the theory offers no sensible noise source terms. To demonstrate that the Acoustic Analogy can fail to identify the correct noise sources, four examples are considered. They include an initial value problem, a boundary problem, the problem of weak solution and the problem of sound generation by instability waves in jets and mixing layers. These examples show clearly how, in each case, the Acoustic Analogy theory identifies the wrong noise source. Indeed, the Acoustic Analogy could provide, if not careful, misleading interpretation of the physics of sound generation.

This paper is dedicated to Professor David G. Crighton, outstanding applied mathematician, world famous acoustician and a much respected friend.

This paper collects the state of the art and the tremendous progress that has been made in hybrid modeling of aeroacoustic sound. Hybrid modeling is defined such that flow and acoustics are modeled separate and connected by an aeroacoustic model. The contributions will be classified with respect to the aeroacoustic models being developed, covering Lighthill’s analogy, Ffowcs Williams and Hawkings, vortex sound, linearized Euler equations (LEE), and different perturbation equations modeling flow induced sound. Within each topic, specific applications, such as jet noise, aircraft noise, ground mobility, noise, fan noise and human phonation, are covered. We focus on the accomplishments and provide the authors’ contribution to aeroacoustic research. Eventually, a concise summary of the different methods and their capabilities is included.

In low Mach number aeroacoustics, the well-known disparity of scales allows applying hybrid simulation models using different meshes for flow and acoustics, which leads to a fast computational procedure. The hybrid workflow of the perturbed convective wave equation involves three steps: (1) perform unsteady incompressible flow computations on a subdomain; (2) compute the acoustic sources and (3) simulate the acoustic field, using a mesh specifically suited. These aeroacoustic methods seek for a robust, conservative and computational efficient mesh-to-mesh transformation of the aeroacoustic sources. In this paper, the accuracy and the application limitations of a cell-centroid-based conservative interpolation scheme is compared to the computationally advanced cut-volume cell approach in 2D and 3D. Based on a previously validated axial fan model where spurious artifacts have been visualized, the results are evaluated systematically using a grid convergence study. To conclude, the monotonic convergence of both conservative interpolation schemes is demonstrated. Regarding arbitrary mesh deformation (for example, the motion of the vocal folds in human phonation), the study reveals that the computationally simpler cell-centroid-based conservative interpolation can be the method of choice.