Characterization of Turbulent Flow and Pressure Fluctuations Over a Hydrophone by LES

This paper presents a numerical CFD study of the turbulent flow at up to 4 m/s of water around an underwater hydrophone from the company Ocean Sonics. At such high flow rates in tidal environments, pseudo-noise, coming from turbulence induced pressure fluctuations around the hydrophone, contaminate the acoustic noise reading obtained with the device. Through the use of fine scale large eddy simulations (LES) in ANSYS Fluent, this study shows the impact of increasing flow velocities on the generated turbulence and vorticity, as well as identifying regions in the flow, and geometric aspects of the device, that are playing the larger role in pseudo-noise generation.