On the influence of the nozzle exhaust initial conditions on the near field acoustic pressure

Abstract

In this paper, the acoustic pressure generated in the near field of a single stream cold jet is investigated. The analysis is focused on the effect of the initial conditions at the nozzle exit parametrized by considering two different turbulence levels and two different boundary layer thicknesses. The study has been performed by processing a numerical database obtained by large-eddy simulations (LES) of a jet flow at M = 0.9 and Re = 105. Pressure time series are obtained from pointwise virtual probes located in several radial and axial positions in the jet near-field. The acoustic pressure is extracted by the application of a consolidated wavelet-based procedure and the achieved acoustic signals are analyzed in terms of global quantities as well as by computing wavelet-reconstructed Fourier spectra. The results show that both the boundary-layer thickness and the turbulence level significantly affect the acoustic pressure in terms of its intensity and directivity whereas the distribution of energy in the frequency domain depends appreciably, only on the boundary-layer thickness.