Flaps are part of the high lift system deployed during take-off and landing phases of aircraft operation. Previous work has identified a flap side-edge as an important source of airframe noise.

The objective of this work is to perform a numerical study aimed at the design and optimization of a suitable flow control technique to reduce the flap side-edge noise. The flow control method can be either passive or active. The chosen flow control technique will be investigated computationally using a high performance cluster.

A hybrid method involving computational fluid dynamics to obtain the flowfield and solving the Ffwocs-Williams Hawkings equation to obtain the farfield acoustics will be employed to determine the noise generated by the flap side-edge vortex. An optimization will be performed on the chosen flow control technique to maximize its aeroacoustic performance. Details of a wind tunnel test campaign will also be given.

The work will be conducted at the University of Southampton, which has extensive experience in both computational and experimental aeroacoustic studies. The university also has access to several high performance computing clusters, which are necessary for the current work. At the end of this work, a flow control strategy will be determined and an optimization performed.