Book Description

The design constraints on jet engines for high performance supersonic military aircraft require lower bypass ratios and supersonic exhaust velocities, which result in very high noise levels. This is a great concern to the US Navy as the noise generated from the jet exhaust of high performance supersonic military aircraft can affect the hearing and performance of personnel working in close proximity of the aircraft. There have been reports about the US Department of Veteran Affairs spending over hundreds of millions of dollars in disability payments for hearing loss compensation to former Navy personnel. In addition to this, jet noise is also a source of annoyance in communities in the vicinity of airbases and military training routes.Over the years, several noise reduction methods have been proposed with varying levels of success. The most effective noise reduction strategies include the installation of chevrons, and the use of corrugated seals, among many others. One primary disadvantage of these technologies is that they are passive technologies and cannot be switched off or modified after take-off and hence may reduce overall aircraft performance. An active, though steady, noise reduction technology is the use of fluid inserts in the divergent section of a converging-diverging nozzle. The fluid inserts consist of rows of injectors that inject a small amount of bypass air into the diverging section of the nozzle. It has been shown that by altering the configuration and operating conditions of the fluid inserts, noise reduction for both mixing and shock noise can be achieved. Since this blowing can be controlled, the fluid inserts can be switched off or modified after take-off to minimize any performance penalty to the aircraft.Although considerable experimental research has been performed to explore the effects of fluid inserts on the jet exhaust, the available data have been found to be insufficient to correlate the noise reduction with changes in the flow-field due to the noise reduction device. The present study is an extension to the previousresearch on fluid inserts that uses Large Eddy Simulation (LES) with the Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings (FWH) analogy for farfield noise prediction. The simulations are carried out using a commercially available CFD package, STAR-CCM+. The project aims to simulate and analyze the unsteady flow changes associated withthe noise reduction device to help understand the detailed mechanisms for the observed noise reductions.Different fluid insert configurations are used to analyze the effect of individual injector placement in a fluid insert on noise generation. It is observed that the changes in upstream noise correlate extremely well with the shock structure of the fluid insert jets downstream of the nozzle exit. Further insight into the noisereduction patterns is obtained by using two-point space time correlations and the use of the modal techniques such as Proper Orthogonal Decomposition on the near-field data on the FWH surface, which show that fluid inserts reduce the amplitude of the noise radiating coherent structures. Using Doaks Momentum Potential Theory, it is observed that the changes associated with fluid insertson the hydrodynamic and acoustic modes correlate well with the far-field noise reduction.