This study describes a technique that combines the benefits of focusing schlieren and phase conditioning. Focusing schlieren blurs and drops... Show moreThis study describes a technique that combines the benefits of focusing schlieren and phase conditioning. Focusing schlieren blurs and drops contrast of non-critical features whereas phase conditioning emphasizes periodic flow features, and their combination produces unique results. The supersonic jets that we studied produced an intense tone referred to as screech. The measured screech tone signal was used as input to the phase conditioning circuit that adjusted the strobing light source to the vertical synchronization pulse of a CCD camera. The sharp video images obtained by this technique could either be frozen or continuously swept through one period of screech to acquire a slow motion video record of the jet unsteadiness. Two cases were visualized in this study: first, an underexpanded jet from a convergent rectangular nozzle at various fully expanded Mach numbers. Second, a supersonic jet emerging from a convergent-divergent rectangular nozzle at a design Mach number of 1.4, artificially excited by impingement tones. The results of this study illustrate the usefulness of this system in visualizing oscillatory flows. Show less
This paper examines a supersonic multi-jet interaction problem that we believe is likely to be important for mixing enhancement and noise... Show moreThis paper examines a supersonic multi-jet interaction problem that we believe is likely to be important for mixing enhancement and noise reduction in supersonic mixer-ejector nozzles. We demonstrate that it is possible to synchronize the screech instability of four rectangular jets by precisely adjusting the inter-jet spacing. Our experimental data agree with a theory that assumes that the phase-locking of adjacent jets occurs through a coupling at the jet lip. Although synchronization does not change the frequency of the screech tone, its amplitude is augmented. The synchronized multi-jets exhibit higher spreading than the unsynchronized jets, with the single jet spreading the least. We compare the near-field noise of the four jets with synchronized screech to the noise of the sum of four jets operated individually. Our noise measurements reveal that the more rapid mixing of the synchronized multi-jets causes the peak jet noise source to move upstream and to radiate noise at larger angles to the flow direction. Based on our results, we have grounds to believe that screech synchronization is advantageous for noise reduction internal to a mixer-ejector nozzle, since the noise can now be suppressed by a shorter acoustically lined ejector. Show less
