Supersonic Jet Noise Reduction with Novel Fluidic Injection Techniques

Supersonic jets provide unique challenges in the aeroacoustic field due to very high jet velocities, shock associated noise components, flow dependence on jet expansion, and stringent performance requirements. Current noise suppression technology for commercial and military jet engines revolves around using chevrons or mechanical vortex generators to increase mixing near the nozzle exit, subsequently reducing peak turbulence levels in the mixing region. Passive noise control methods such as mechanical chevrons cause thrust loss throughout the flight envelope and performance can vary with the engine operating condition. Development of active noise control methods have the potential of improved performance throughout the flight envelope and the benefit of being deactivated when noise control is unnecessary. Fluidic injection of air into a supersonic jet is studied as an active control method with an emphasis on understanding the physics of the problem and identifying the controlling parameters. An experimental investigation with computational collaboration was conducted to understand the e↵ect of nozzle design on supersonic jet noise and to develop various fluidic injection techniques to control noise from a supersonic jet with a design Mach number of 1.56. The jet was studied at overexpanded, ideally expanded, and underexpanded conditions to evaluate the e↵ects throughout the operational envelope. As a passive noise control method, the internal contour of a realistic nozzle was modified to investigate the e↵ect on acoustics and performance. Thrust was improved up to 10% with no acoustic penalties through nozzle design, however it was found that the shock noise components were highly sensitive to the shock structure in the jet. Steady fluidic injection was used to generate vorticity at the trailing edge of the nozzle showing that noise reduction is achieved through vorticity generation, modification i of the shock structure, and interference with the screech feedback mechanism by decoupling the phase relationship between jet turbulence and shock spacing. Reduction of shock noise was found to be optimum at an intermediate injection pressure due to shock weakening from the fluidic injectors and injector interactions with the jet shock-expansion structure. Largescale mixing noise reduction was shown to depend on the vorticity strength and circulation. Unprecedented reduction of OASPL up to -8.5 dB were achieved at the peak noise direction through strong jet mixing and rapid collapse of the potential core. Pulsed fluidic injection was investigated to understand the acoustic benefits and drawbacks of unsteady injection. Valve frequency response up to 500 Hz was achieved but noise reduction dropped o↵ above 100 Hz due to poor flow response as verified by hot-wire and dynamic pressure measurements. At low pulse frequencies it was found that moderate noise reduction could be achieved with less flow than steady injection, but in general the mixing noise reduction scaled with the time integrated mass flow injection. It was discovered that the di↵erent components of supersonic jet noise had di↵erent characteristic response times to unsteady injection. Analysis of high speed shadowgraph images and acoustic spectra was used to identify time response of the jet during the unsteady injection cycle. Development of a code to apply the E↵ective Perceived Noise Level standard to laboratory jets was used to evaluate the various noise reduction methods. It was shown that EPNL was a↵ected most strongly by the sideline spectrum and the jet shock noise since EPNL is dominated by the maximum noise during a flight event, which almost always occurs when the aircraft passes nearest to the observer. The methods of noise reduction show potential for reduction of EPNL up to -4 dB and 50% reduction in the noise footprint area near the jet take-o↵ location. ii Copyright © 2013 Daniel Cuppoletti