Aeroacoustics of isolated and installed jets under static and in-flight conditions

In modern aircraft configurations, the interaction between the exhausted jet with the wing and high-lift devices is set to increase substantially the total aircraft noise generated during take-off. Regarding ultra-high bypass ratio turbofan engines mounted underneath the wing, the jet plume is expected to interact strongly with rigid surfaces. The interaction between the high-speed flow and aircraft structures modifies the ‘pure’ jet mixing noise and enhance the scattered hydrodynamic field. Thus, understanding the changes to the jet turbulence flow field caused by the presence of a solid boundary is vital to predict and mitigate the engine noise produced by commercial aircraft which will be introduced imminently. In this thesis, the statistics of the streamwise component of the velocity of subsonic jets is investigated in detail. In close-coupled installed jet configurations, the interaction between the jet and a rigid surface leads to a local flow acceleration and to lower turbulence levels near the solid boundary. These effects are consistent with the conservation of momentum and the ‘beak-down’ of the eddies in that region. The characteristic length scales of these installed jet configurations are smaller than the isolated jet scales. The effects of forward flight upon the turbulence field is also considered. A stretching factor with flight velocity is obtained by considering the jet virtual origin. Models for the coherence decay, time and length scales are proposed based on experimental evidence and the assumption of frozen turbulence in the region of maximum turbulence kinetic energy. For the first time, two-point statistic models are proposed for high-subsonic and installed jet configurations. Finally, analysis of the far field of installed jets show that a strong interaction between the jet turbulence field and a solid boundary generates an additional high-frequency noise. Thus, the existence of a noise source mechanism related to the flow-structure interplay is demonstrated. It is hoped that the experimental data and analysis presented in this work provide feedback for jet noise source modelling and also future numerical and large-scale laboratory experiments.