Wavepacket intermittency and its role in turbulent jet noise

Abstract

The intermittent behavior of large-scale coherent structures in turbulent jets is studied. These structures are the primary source of jet noise, and their emitted sound is in turn characterized by rapid amplitude modulations of the pressure field. These high-energy bursts are well portrayed in the frequency-time domain by means of time-local analysis techniques. Scaleograms obtained from wavelet transforms of a single-point pressure signals, for example, enable the identification of such loud events at specific locations. Our interest, however, is in the time-local behavior of the coherent structures as a whole to gain a physical understanding of jet noise generation. For that purpose, a time series of large-eddy simulation snapshots is projected onto two sets of modal basis functions that describe the large-scale structures in the frequency-domain. The first modal basis consists of frequency-domain, or spectral, POD modes that are empirically deduced from the data. The second basis is comprised of resolvent response modes that are obtained from a linear frequency-response analysis of the mean flow. The proposed method allows us to visualize the intermittent behavior of the modal solutions in the frequency-time domain in terms of magnitude contours of the projection coefficient. The results can then be interpreted in an analogous way to wavelet scaleograms. The limitations, benefits and the potential of the method to yield a low-order representation of the flow in the time domain are discussed.