Porous media are a promising technology to reduce turbulent boundary layer trailing edge noise. However, the fact that the porous material is grazed by turbulent flow on both sides makes its characterization not trivial. This paper describes the modifications resulting from the interaction between the grazing flows through the porous medium, defined as communication. To this end, lattice-Boltzmann simulations of two communicating turbulent channel flows separated by a fully resolved porous medium are carried out. The porous medium is realized as a 75% porous triply periodic minimal surface of type Schwarz’ P. Results are compared against the case with porous medium backed by a solid wall and the smooth wall channel flow. When communication between the two channel flows is allowed, spanwise coherent structures appear that are assimilated to a shear instability at a non-dimensional frequency of. Instantaneous flow through the porous medium is observed and is driven by a time-dependent pressure differential between the channels (with a zero mean and 7.8 Pa standard deviation). This leads to a decrease in energy in turbulent scales smaller than 2.5δ and for bulk scaled frequencies greater than. These flow modifications are not observed in the non-communicating case, with the wall preventing flow through, where the topology of the fluctuating statistics is similar to the smooth wall case. Finally, the drag is found to increase by over 200% with respect to the non-communicating case and 650% with respect to a smooth turbulent channel flow. The drag increase is found to be driven by the velocity fluctuations impinging on the porous topology. The communication does not follow the asymptotic drag relation for the same equivalent roughness, thus entering a different drag regime.

Permeable materials are a promising trailing edge noise reduction technique. The noise reduction is a result of the unsteady interaction between the two communicating boundary layers, in a process referred to as the pressure release mechanism. However, in practice the aeroacoustic performance of permeable trailing edges degrades under lifting conditions, i.e. with a pressure and velocity differential. This study aims at investigating such flow physics using the Lattice Boltzmann Method through 3DS Power FLOW. A numerical setup was created to explore the impact of velocity and pressure differentials between two communicating boundary layers and relate them to the aeroacoustic performance of porous media. The proposed numerical setup consists of two vertically stacked temporally developing channel flows separated by a porous medium (6δ × (4δ + t) × 2 δ), where δ and t are the half-channel height and the porous medium thickness respectively. The two channel flows communicate through fully resolved porous media, here, 75% porous triply periodic minimal surfaces. A large drag increase is observed for all geometries. An increase in anti-correlation between the pressure fluctuations between the channels is found to be related to a drag increase. It was concluded that the spanwise coherent turbulent structures drive the increase in drag. These structures are also affected by the geometry of the porous medium at the surface of the grazing flows. The presence of large coherent turbulent structures leads to a shift in turbulent energy scales. This is related to the modification of the wall pressure spectrum, where it was observed that less energy is present at low frequencies, whereas a peak was observed at a higher frequency. The crossover frequency is between 150Hz and 600Hz.