Experimental and numerical investigation of confined unsteady supersonic flow over cavities

Experimental investigations were carried out to study the acoustic radiation from a rectangular wall mounted cavity in a confined supersonic flow. The free-stream Mach number was maintained at 1.5 and the cavity length-to-depth ratio was varied from 0.43 to 5.0. Acoustic measurements made on the top wall using microphones show jumps in the dominant frequency as the cavity behavior changes from shallow-to-square-todeep cavity. Numerical simulations of this unsteady two-dimensional flow using the commercially available software FLUENT have also been carried out. Unsteady pressure data at the same location in the flowfield as the pressure transducers in the experiments was collected. FFT analysis of the unsteady pressure data was performed to obtain the dominant acoustic frequencies. The values for these dominant frequencies predicted by the numerical calculations agree well with experimental data and the numerical study also predicts the frequency jump observed in experiments. © 2002 by the author(s). Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.