Book Description

The investigation of military jet noise prediction and reduction is an ongoing activity. Supersonic military jets radiate higher noise levels than commercial aircraft and are not subject to noise requirements. The noise generating mechanisms for high-speed jets are not entirely understood, making it difficult to set strict noise standards similar to those imposed for commercial aircraft. However, many noise reduction techniques have been applied to attempt to alleviate environmental and health concerns. Little success has been achieved to date for noise reduction of exhaust jets on supersonic tactical aircraft.A newly developed method involves a system that generates fluidic inserts in a supersonic nozzle flow to produce noise reduction. Numerical simulations have been performed for a military-style basline nozzle and with the noise reduction method of fluidic inserts used at a design Mach number of 1.65 and at various off design conditions. The purpose of the current numerical study is to provide insight for the flow field generated by the fluidic inserts used to reduce supersonic jet noise. The supersonic jet simulations are based on the use of high fidelity meshes combined with advanced CFD technology. Steady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations are used to predict the flow field. Noise measurements have been performed experimentally and the results from the numerical simulations provide a correlation between aerodynamic properties and the corresponding noise reduction. The complex nozzle geometry is modeled using both an unstructured mesh and a multiblock structured mesh. The grids are generated by ANSYS ICEM and Gridgen respectively. The numerical simulations are performed using ANSYS CFX and Wind-US. The simulations with Wind-US use the Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model, while the simulations with ANSYS CFX use the Menter SST turbulence model. The results from the two flow solvers are compared and provide good agreement. The objective is to simulate a military-style nozzle, which resembles engines of the GE F404 family, with fluidic inserts. The purpose of the fluidic inserts is to alter the flow field similar to that of a hard wall corrugation in order to reduce components of noise radiation. The addition of the fluidic inserts increases the complexity of the flow field for the supersonic jet. The numerical simulations performed help to better distinguish the effects on the flow field due to the fluidic inserts. Preliminary work has been performed on a simpler geometry to provide further insight to the effect of the fluidic inserts on the supersonic jet flow field. These simulations are performed by fluid injection into a supersonic freestream over a flat plate. All numerical simulations used a freestream Mach number of 1.5. The numerical simulations used a wide range of pressure ratios for injecting the fluid into the supersonic freestream. By changing the pressure ratio of the fluid injection, the deflection of the freestream flow was better understood. Simulations on a full three dimensional nozzle with fluidic inserts were performed with conditions based on the preliminary studies. Parameters such as total pressure and total temperature provide a representation of the fluidic insert shape. Other integrated flow properties at the nozzle exit such as streamwise vorticity and pressure differential were used to correlate with the noise reduction seen in the experiments.