Investigation of orifice aeroacoustics by means of multi-port methods

Comprehensive methods to cascade active multi-ports, e.g., for acoustic network prediction, have until now only been available for plane waves. This paper presents procedures to combine multi-ports with an arbitrary number of considered duct modes. A multi-port method is used to extract complex mode amplitudes from experimental data of single and tandem in-duct orifice plates for Helmholtz numbers up to around 4 and, hence, beyond the cut-on of several higher order modes. The theory of connecting single multi-ports to linear cascades is derived for the passive properties (the scattering of the system) and the active properties (the source cross-spectrum matrix of the system). One scope of this paper is to investigate the influence of the hydrodynamic near field on the accuracy of both the passive and the active predictions in multi-port cascades. The scattering and the source cross-spectrum matrix of tandem orifice configurations is measured for three cases, namely, with a distance between the plates of 10 duct diameter, for which the downstream orifice is outside the jet of the upstream orifice, 4 duct diameter, and 2 duct diameter (both inside the jet). The results are compared with predictions from single orifice measurements. It is shown that the scattering is only sensitive to disturbed inflow in certain frequency ranges where coupling between the flow and sound field exists, whereas the source cross-spectrum matrix is very sensitive to disturbed inflow for all frequencies. An important part of the analysis is based on an eigenvalue analysis of the scattering matrix and the source cross-spectrum matrix to evaluate the potential of sound amplification and dominant source mechanisms.