For a small body of size in flow of speed , force of order varying on time produces an acoustic dipole density amplitude of the displayed order, where is the Mach number. Its sound power scales as . The corresponding compact acoustic quadrupole Mach-number scaling has density amplitude of order and power .
Acoustic loading noise Created 2026-10-07 Updated 2026-10-14
Loading noise is the acoustic dipole radiation of the force exerted by a body on its surrounding fluid. For a compact, slowly moving source, the radiating acoustic density perturbation is , where is the total force. If this total is constant, finite source-delay corrections can still create higher acoustic multipole sources.
Acoustic multipole source 2026-10-06
Acoustic sources may be organized by the number of spatial derivatives in their effective wave equation forcing. A direct scalar source is an acoustic monopole, a divergence of a force density an acoustic dipole, and a double divergence of a stress tensor an acoustic quadrupole.
Two diametrically opposite rotating blades with equal tangential loads have zero total rotating force. Their leading compact acoustic dipoles cancel, but their retarded positions and moving-surface retarded Jacobians leave an acoustic quadrupole. For line load and angular speed , the first radiating density is . The twofold geometry gives frequency , while projection into the rotor plane gives the amplitude directivity .
Distributional acoustic analogy across a moving interface Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-10-14
Mass and momentum flux defects at a moving interface add surface acoustic monopole and acoustic dipole terms to Lighthill acoustic analogy. For a physical conservative fluid shock wave, the Rankine-Hugoniot conditions set both defects to zero; the shock still affects distributional derivatives of the Lighthill stress tensor. A discontinuity alone is not independent mass or force injection.
The Lighthill acoustic analogy for a moving body has a volume acoustic quadrupole, a surface acoustic monopole from acoustic thickness noise, and a surface acoustic dipole from acoustic loading noise. For an impermeable moving surface, with outward normal , normal surface speed , and fluid and body normal velocities equal, the surface mass coefficient is and the surface loading is the force exerted on the fluid. Schematically, the density-source equation is
The density perturbation is understood with the chosen interior extension. Permeable-surface versions have additional mass and momentum flux terms. Source approximations must distinguish local thickness radiation from cancellation of its compact net-volume contribution.
For a fixed impermeable object, the Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings equation has a volume acoustic quadrupole and a surface acoustic dipole, with no mass-injection term. If is the total force exerted on the fluid and the integrated Lighthill stress tensor, the acoustic compact-source approximation in the acoustic far field gives the displayed pressure at retarded time. A force convention directed onto the body reverses the loading sign. The retarded acoustic Green function carries when the wave operator is .
If the continuity equation has mass source and the conservative momentum equation has momentum source , elimination of momentum gives the displayed wave equation. With no imposed momentum source, its extra term is . A compact source of total mass rate radiates the acoustic monopole . The momentum source supplies an additional acoustic dipole; specifying mass injection alone does not fix that dipole.
Interpret the surface delta as , so integration against it gives a surface integral. If is signed distance, this equals the notation directly. This convention is needed because an arbitrary rescaling of the level-set function must not change the physical source.
Define the volume flux and total pressure force . Here is the rate of change of body volume, not the volume itself. The surface acoustic monopole contributes, in the acoustic compact-source approximation,
The surface acoustic dipole contributes
The second term is a nonradiating near-field term and is smaller in the acoustic far field. Writing with the observation point fixed, the leading augmentation is therefore
The printed dipole coefficient is missing a factor . The extra inverse speed follows from differentiating , and is required dimensionally: the printed expression with has the units of density times speed. This corrected acoustic loading noise term also agrees with the far-field acoustic force and stress moments. The monopole coefficient is unchanged.
Let , and . Convolving the source terms in the Lighthill acoustic analogy with the retarded acoustic Green function, and moving their spatial derivatives outside the integral, gives
The integrals have compact spatial support. For an acoustically compact source, its size satisfies , so the source-dependent retardation is negligible at leading order. Also take . Define and . In the radiation terms the spatial derivatives act on , with . Derivatives of produce smaller near-field terms. Thus the far-field acoustic force and stress moments give
Using gives the equivalent powers of requested. The force term is an acoustic dipole; the Lighthill stress tensor produces an acoustic quadrupole.
For a small body in low-speed flow, put . A typical unsteady force has size and time scale , whereas . Therefore
These are the acoustic dipole Mach-number scaling and compact acoustic quadrupole Mach-number scaling. Since and outgoing acoustic intensity is of order , their sound powers scale as
Thus an unsteady force on the body can produce the dominant low-Mach number sound. If the integrated force or its time derivative vanishes, that dipole contribution is absent. Force on the body and force on the fluid have opposite signs.
Let the fluid approach a uniform, quiescent state at infinity. Use the outward unit normal vector , pointing from the object into the fluid. Write for the Heaviside step function, , and . With the viscous stress tensor , define
Thus is the Lighthill stress tensor, and is the surface loading exerted on the fluid. The total force on the object has the opposite sign. Extend by zero inside the object. Since the boundary is fixed and impermeable, , and the distributional mass conservation and momentum conservation equations are
For example, the surface contribution to the momentum equation is . Differentiating the first equation in time and subtracting the divergence of the second gives the fixed-body Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings equation:
There is no acoustic thickness noise: a fixed impermeable boundary injects no mass. Apply the retarded acoustic Green function , where . The supplied surface-delta identity converts the loading term to a surface integral. For an exterior observer, the required integral equation is
This acoustic analogy is an exact rearrangement of the fluid equations; source approximations enter later. In the distant linear acoustic region, .
The acoustic far field requires observer distance much larger than the source extent and , so derivatives of the retarded phase dominate derivatives of . The acoustic compact-source approximation requires , so the source's differential propagation delays can be neglected. These conditions concern different lengths and neither implies the other. Put , , and define the loading and stress moments
The leading compact acoustic far field is
The surface term is an acoustic dipole; the volume term is an acoustic quadrupole. The plus sign of the loading term follows from the minus sign of its spatial divergence and the derivative of retarded time.
For the power comparison, assume low Mach number , high Reynolds number, eddy size , characteristic time , and stress magnitude . Keep the prescribed turbulent region and its leading volume stress comparable when inserting the object; neglect changes of source statistics and exceptional cancellations of the leading moments. Compactness follows from . Since and the outgoing acoustic intensity is , the volume power is
If the object's size is comparable to and its fluctuating resultant loading is , then
Angular factors and dimensionless loading coefficients have been omitted. The acoustic dipole and acoustic quadrupole interference vanishes in the leading power integrated over a full sphere, by odd angular parity; individual directions can show interference.
A size threshold also requires a loading model. For a small nonseparating object of size in an approximately inviscid, smoothly varying incident eddy, a spatially uniform pressure has zero resultant on its closed surface. The first surviving loading is the pressure-gradient or added mass force, . Under these explicitly stated assumptions,
The two mechanisms become comparable at ; for smaller objects the cases with and without the object have the same leading order of power. This is the small-body loading-noise threshold. It is not a geometry-independent size law: a separated drag force fluctuating on the original eddy time instead gives and . If both force and time are set by body-scale eddies, , their loading power is and comparison with the original volume source gives . Each estimate states which source time and force it uses.
The physical distinction is momentum conservation. Unforced turbulence in a fluid supplies internal stresses, whose net-force contribution cancels and leaves acoustic quadrupole radiation. The supported object exchanges momentum with the fluid and the external support, permitting a time-dependent resultant force and acoustic dipole radiation. One fewer retarded derivative makes the loading radiation more efficient at low Mach number.
Put , and take the retarded acoustic Green function for :
This selects the causal, outgoing acoustic density perturbation, with no additional incoming homogeneous wave equation solution. Convolving the acoustic dipole forcing with this Green function and moving its spatial derivative outside the integral gives
The surface delta distribution converts the spatial integral to the moving surface. At fixed surface labels , set
The radial Mach number enters the moving-surface retarded Jacobian, because and hence
Let be a root of the retarded time equation
The delta change-of-variable rule now gives
Here is the surface-area factor from the orthogonal surface coordinates. For a subsonic surface, , the retarded equation is monotone in and has one root when the motion is defined for the required past times. For more general motion, sum the displayed contribution over all simple retarded roots. A root with requires a separate limiting treatment; the simple-root formula does not apply there.
In the Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings equation, the other source types are a surface acoustic monopole associated with acoustic thickness noise, and a volume acoustic quadrupole involving the Lighthill stress tensor. On an impermeable material surface, fluid and surface normal velocities agree. There is no through-surface mass-flux source; the remaining thickness source is . For a rigid body, the leading acoustic compact-source approximation to that source has
Thus there is no leading net-volume acoustic monopole. To neglect thickness radiation beyond that leading cancellation, assume negligible volume displacement, as for ideal thin blades, or that its higher multipoles are small compared with the retained acoustic loading noise. Rigidity alone does not make a moving finite-volume body's local thickness source identically zero.
The volume acoustic quadrupole may be neglected for low Mach number motion when exterior turbulent or nonlinear stresses do not provide a competing strong source. We also assume small linear acoustics perturbations, a uniform reference sound speed, and negligible relevant viscous and entropy sources. These are source-strength approximations, particularly important if a loading contribution itself cancels by symmetry. Under them, the retained acoustic dipole is the force exerted by the object on the fluid, with the sign used in the previous solution.
Let , , and . In the acoustic far field, is large compared with the object and . For a source of size with and small surface Mach number, source-dependent delays and the Doppler factor can be neglected to leading order. The surface integral then contains just the total force . Differentiating its retarded time, rather than its spreading factor, gives the radiating term
The sign follows from . Differentiating or the direction instead produces the lower-order near field. A constant total force does not radiate at this leading compact order.
The rotation introduces angular frequency and, after combining the two blades, harmonics such as . The acoustic compact-source approximation requires the propagation time to be small compared with . Thus
It also bounds every blade element's Mach number by . Consequently , and its leading value is one. The separate acoustic far field condition is .
Choose the positive rotation sense so that a first blade at phase has radial and tangential unit vectors
Integrating the given line force from to yields . Its axial component is constant, while . Since , the compact acoustic dipole sound from this blade is
The other blade has phase and contributes the opposite rotating force. At a common compact retarded time, their total force is , so
This cancellation calls for the next source-delay correction; it does not mean that the complete moving-source field vanishes.
Apply the moving-interface conservation jump identity first to mass, then to each momentum component. Write and , with all quantities understood piecewise on the two sides. Define the jumps of flux relative to the moving shock wave by
The global distributional conservation equations are
Differentiate the first in time and subtract the divergence of the second. With and the piecewise Lighthill stress tensor , this gives
Derivatives act on the complete distributions, including their moving support. The acoustic quadrupole term represents momentum-stress fluctuations throughout the volume. The time derivative of the surface mass-flux defect is an acoustic monopole, representing injection or removal of mass/volume. The divergence of the surface momentum-flux defect is an acoustic dipole, representing a force sheet. This is the distributional acoustic analogy across a moving interface.
For an actual freely propagating fluid shock wave with no singular mass or momentum supply, the Rankine-Hugoniot conditions give and . Such a shock does not acquire independent monopole and force-sheet sources merely because it is discontinuous. Its effects remain in the distributional derivatives of , including singular derivatives of its jump. Nonzero surface sources are appropriate for an interface with exchange/forcing or for a formulation that omits one side of the fluid.
A shock does not, by itself, justify retaining the scaling. That estimate required a low-Mach number stress varying on the slow time . Fast shock motion, short time scales, or thermodynamic deviations can invalidate that estimate. If these same compact, slow-source assumptions remain valid for the integrated Lighthill stress tensor, its quadrupole estimate still follows, even distributionally. There is no universal replacement power deducible from the mere presence of a shock; nor should vanished physical flux defects be treated as additional independent radiation sources.
For a nonseparating small body in a smooth nearly inviscid eddy of speed and length , the fluctuating resultant is an added mass or pressure-gradient force . A uniform pressure integrates to zero over a closed surface. With time , its acoustic dipole power divided by the eddy's acoustic quadrupole power is , where is the Mach number. Equal powers therefore give the displayed threshold. An area-scaled separated drag force with the same eddy time instead gives ; a body-scale time gives a different criterion. The threshold depends on the specified loading and time models.
For a small rigid sphere translating with velocity , the integrated thickness source vanishes. The first spatial moment is instead , where is the sphere volume. Expanding the retarded time across the compact source gives the displayed first nonzero thickness field. It is an acoustic dipole, at the same order as acoustic loading noise for a translating sphere. The added mass of a sphere supplies half this volume-mass coefficient through the loading term; their sum is .