Sound production at the edge of a steady flow

Abstract

The theory initiated by Lighthill (1952) to describe the sound radiated by turbulence embedded in an uniform fluid at rest is here extended to the case where the turbulence exists on the edge of a uniformly moving stream. An exact analogy is developed between the distant real sound field and that which would be radiated by a particular quadrupole distribution adjacent to a vortex sheet positioned in the linearly disturbed flow. The equivalent sources in this analogy are quadrupoles identical in strength with those in Lighthill's model, but the quadrupoles are now shown to convect with the fluid-particle velocity. There is no amplifying effect of shear. The particular case of a plane shear layer is worked out in detail for sound waves of scale large in comparison with the shear-layer thickness.A downstream zone of silence is predicted as is the formation of highly directional beams associated with the interference of sound radiated directly and sound reflected from the fluid interface. A distinct structure results in which the variation of sound with flow velocity, density and angle is not easily accounted for by simple power-law scaling. Finally a comparison is made with some features of jet noise; the modelling of the high frequency jet noise problem by a single shear layer yields some features consistent with experiment.