Experimental study on effects of plate angle on acoustic waves from supersonic impinging jets

This study experimentally investigates the generation mechanism of a higher-angle lobe which is an acoustic field feature of a supersonic jet impinging on an inclined flat plate. The overall sound pressure level distribution and spectra, the conditional averages of near field schlieren movies, and the time-averaged wall pressure distribution were obtained for three cases of Mach 1.8 ideally expanded impinging jets with plate angles of 45°, 22.5°, and 10° to the jet downstream axis. In the 45° and 22.5° cases, a higher-angle lobe appears. The dominant acoustic waves in the higher-angle lobe are radiated from the source region that contains shock waves and are suggested to be correlated with large-scale turbulent structures. These results suggest that the higher-angle lobe is dominated by acoustic waves generated by the interaction between the shock waves and large-scale turbulent structures. This inference is supported by the fact that the near-field acoustic wave patterns are qualitatively reproduced by the interference of monopoles located near the shock waves in the 45° and 22.5° cases and that neither the shock wave nor the higher-angle lobe is observed in the 10° case.