Aircraft noise reduction technology development has been aided by the use of acoustic phased arrays to identify component-level locations of noise sources. Acoustic phased arrays are commonly used in both closed-wall and open-jet wind tunnels, thus requiring accurate acoustic propagation models to focus the array. In particular, open-jet wind tunnels have complex flow fields including a free shear layer that the acoustic waves must propagate through. A method using ray tracing is reviewed and an enhancement proposed to reduce the computational time for cases requiring a large number of rays. The proposed reduced ray casting method uses ray tracing to the extreme edges of the region of interest and limits all casted acoustic rays to within that region. The results showed that a hemispherical spiral discretization had lower error in the estimated acoustic propagation time than uniform angular discretization. The proposed reduced ray casting method showed similar accuracy as the original ray casting method but with improvement in the computational times when the number of cast rays was greater than 3200 as needed for modeling acoustic propagation in larger industrial sized open-jet wind tunnels.
