van den Berg, Stanislas Franck.

The interaction of rotor turbulence with the stator is currently believed to be the predominant mechanism of noise radiation from turbofans in aircraft engines. This thesis presents a general method to compute unsteady 2-D potential flows past a cascade of airfoils. The procedure uses source and vortex distributions on the surface of the airfoils, creation of wakes downstream of the airfoils and non-linear convection of the perturbed flow. These features are designed to satisfy a condition of no-flow through the surface of the airfoils and the Kutta condition at the trailing edge of each of these airfoils. The investigation proves the importance of applying the Kutta condition. It was also shown that an infinite cascade is well approximated by a small number of airfoils and that the non-linear rather than linear convection of vorticity has a large effect on the spectrum of the unsteady lift of an airfoil.