Investigation of flow structures involved in sound generation by two- and three-dimensional cavity flows

Abstract

Proper Orthogonal Decomposition and Stochastic Estimation are combined to shed some light on the link between organized flow structures and noise generation by turbulent flows. Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) is firstly used to extract selected flow events. Based on the knowledge of these structures, the Quadratic Stochastic Estimation of the acoustic pressure field is secondly performed. Both procedures are successively applied to two- and three-dimensional numerical databases of a flow over a cavity. It is demonstrated that POD can extract selected aerodynamic events which can be associated with selected frequencies in the acoustic spectra. Reconstructed acoustic fields also indicate the aerodynamic events which are responsible of the main energy of the noise emission. Such mathematical tools offer new perspectives in analysing flow structures involved in sound generation by turbulent flows and in the experimental design of a flow control strategy.