Entropy inhomogeneities and vorticity spots induce so-called indirect combustion noise when passing through a choked nozzle; referred to as entropy noise and vorticity noise, respectively. We note that vorticity noise depends on the orientation of the vorticity; viz., oriented normal or parallel to the axial main flow. An experimental investigation of parallel component vorticity noise is presented. In the experiment a time-dependent swirling flow was induced by unsteady tangential injection in the pipe upstream of a choked convergent-divergent nozzle. As the resulting swirling flow passes through the nozzle, the axial stretching of the fluid caused an increase in rotation energy. The steady energy conservation in an isentropic flow implies a Mach number higher than unity at the throat and an associated reduction of density. Ergo, the critical mass-flow rate (for fixed reservoir pressure and temperature) decreases quadratically with increasing swirl intensity. The acoustic waves radiated downstream of the nozzle are due to the change in the mass flow through the nozzle. These are a direct measure for this mass-flow modulation. Using a semi-empirical model, this sound production mechanism is demonstrated to be quasi steady.

In order to cope with increasing air traffic and the requirement to decrease the overall footprint of the aviation sector-making it more sustainably and acceptable for the whole society-drastic technology improvements are required beside all other measures. This includes also the development of novel aircraft configurations and associated technologies which are anticipated to bring significant improvements for fuel burn, gaseous and noise emissions compared to the current state and the current evolutionary development. Several research projects all over the world have been investigating specific technologies to address these goals individually, or novel-sometimes also called "disruptive" -aircraft concepts as a whole. The chapter provides a small glimpse on these activities-mainly from a point of view of recent European funded research activities like Horizon2020 projects ARTEM, PARSIFAL, and SENECA being by no-way complete or exhaustive. The focus of this collection is on noise implications of exemplary novel concepts as this is one of the most complicated and least addressed topics in the assessment of aircraft configurations in an early design stage. Beside the boundary layer ingestion concept, the design process for a blended wing body aircraft is described, a box-wing concept is presented and an outlook on emerging supersonic air transport is given.

An experimental cold-gas study of the response of a choked convergent–divergent nozzle to swirl perturbations is presented. The perturbations were obtained by means of upstream unsteady tangential injections into initially steady flows with different values of steady background swirl. The swirl perturbations induced changes in the axial mass-flow rate, due to either their ingestion or evacuation by the nozzle. This in turn caused a downstream acoustic response. For low-intensity background swirl the responses were found to be similar to those obtained without steady background swirl. Perturbations of a high-intensity background swirl led to different effects. For long injection times, the negative mass-flow rate modulation occurred in two stages. The first stage was similar to that of the background-swirl free case. The second stage occurred after a short time delay, and induced a much stronger negative acoustic response. This unexpected behavior suggests that a significant part of the tangentially injected fluid flows upstream inducing an accumulation of swirl, which is – after tangential injection is ceased – suddenly cleared out through the nozzle. A scaling rule for the amplitudes of these acoustic responses is reported. Furthermore, quasi-steady models, based on steady-state measurements are proposed. These models predict the downstream acoustic response amplitude within a factor two. Additionally, preliminary empirical evidence of the effect of swirl on the downstream acoustic response due to the interaction of entropy patches with a choked nozzle is reported. This was obtained by comparison of sound produced by abrupt radial or tangential sonic injection, upstream from the choked nozzle, of air from a reservoir at room temperature to that from a reservoir with a higher stagnation temperature. Because the mass flow through the nozzle does not increase instantaneously, the injected higher-enthalpy air accumulates upstream of the injection-port position in the main flow. This eventually induces a large downstream acoustic pulse when tangential injection is interrupted. The magnitude of the resulting sound pulse can reach that of a quasi-steady response of the nozzle to a large air patch with a uniform stagnation temperature equal to that of the upstream-injected heated air. This hypothesis is consistent with the fact that the initial indirect-sound pulse is identical to one obtained with unheated air injection. The authors posit that – given all of the insight gleaned from them in this case – acoustic measurements of indirect sound appear to be a potentially useful diagnostic tool.

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Quantitative measurements of sound due to swirl-nozzle interaction are presented for the first time. In the experiment a swirl structure was generated by means of tangential injection into a steady swirl-free flow upstream from a choked convergent-divergent nozzle. Ingestion of swirl by the choked nozzle caused a mass-flow rate change, which resulted in a downstream measured acoustic response. The amplitude of this acoustic response was found to be proportional to the square of the tangential mass-flow rate used to generate swirl. This was, assuming that the upstream generated swirl intensity is proportional to the tangential injection mass-flow rate, predicted by a previously published quasi-steady model for the swirl-nozzle interaction sound source (Hirschberg, L., Hulshoff, S. J., and Bake, F., “Sound Production due to Swirl-Nozzle Interaction: Model-Based Analysis of Experiments,” AIAA Journal, Published online on Nov. 11th 2020, doi: 10.2514/1.J059669.). The tangential-injection time was varied, and found to not influence the amplitude of the acoustic response. This indicates that quasi-steady modelling remains applicable, even for smallest achievable upstream swirl structure with an axial length of ca. three upstream diameters.

Measurements of sound due to swirl–nozzle interaction are presented. In the experiment a swirl structure was generated by means of unsteady tangential injection into a steady swirl-free flow upstream from a choked convergent–divergent nozzle. Ingestion of swirl by the choked nozzle caused a mass-flow rate change, which resulted in a downstream-measured acoustic response. The downstream acoustic pressure was found to remain negative as long as the swirl is maintained and reflections from the open downstream pipe termination do not interfere. The amplitude of this initial acoustic response was found to be proportional to the square of the tangential mass-flow rate used to generate swirl. When the tangential injection valve was closed, the mass-flow rate through the nozzle increased, resulting in an increase of the downstream acoustic pressure. This increase in signal was compared to the prediction of an empirical quasi-steady model, constructed from steady-state flow measurements. As the opening time of the valve was varied, the signal due to swirl evacuation showed an initial overshoot with respect to quasi-steady behavior, after which it gradually decayed to quasi-steady behavior for tangential injection times long compared to the convection time in the pipe upstream of the nozzle. This demonstrates that the acoustic signal can be used to obtain quantitative information concerning the time dependence of the swirl in the system. This could be useful for understanding the dynamics of flow in engines with swirl-stabilized combustion. Graphic abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.].