Scholarly Works, Aerospace and Ocean Engineering

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Browsing Scholarly Works, Aerospace and Ocean Engineering by Author "Alexander, W. Nathan"

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    Investigating the Aeroacoustic Properties of Kevlar Fabrics
    Szőke, Máté; Devenport, William J.; Nurani Hari, Nandita; Alexander, W. Nathan; Glegg, Stewart A. L.; Li, Ang; Vallabh, Rahul; Seyam, Abdel-Fattah M. (2021-02-08)
    The aeroacoustic properties of porous fabrics are investigated experimentally in an effort to find a porous fabric as an ideal interface between wind tunnel flow and quiescent conditions. Currently, the commercially available Kevlar type 120 fabric is widely used for similar applications, such as side-walls in hybrid anechoic wind tunnels or as a cover of phased microphone arrays. A total number of 8 fabrics were investigated, namely, four glass fiber fabrics, two plain weave Kevlar fabrics, and two modified plain Kevlar fabrics with their pores clogged. Two, custom-made rigs were used to quantify the transmission loss and self-noise of all eight fabrics. It was found that the pores serve as a low-resistance gateway for sound waves to pass through, hence enabling a low transmission loss. The transmission loss was found to increase with decreasing open area ratio while other fabric properties had a minor impact on transmission loss. The self-noise of the fabrics has also been evaluated and it was found that the thread density (thread per inch) is a primary factor of determining the frequency range of self-noise with the open area ratio potentially playing a secondary role in the self-noise levels. For both metrics, the mass per unit area seemed to play a minor role in the aeroacoustic performances of the fabrics. Finally, surface pressure measurements revealed that the commercially available plain Kevlar (type 120) has no quantifiable effect on the hydrodynamic pressure field passing over the fabric, sug- gesting that Kevlar behaves as a no-slip wall from the flow's perspective when no pressure difference is present on the two sides of the fabric.
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    Wall-pressure fluctuations in an axisymmetric boundary layer under strong adverse pressure gradient
    Balantrapu, N. Agastya; Alexander, W. Nathan; Devenport, William J. (Cambridge University Press, 2023-04)
    Measurements of fluctuating wall pressure in a high-Reynolds-number flow over a body of revolution are described. With a strong axial pressure gradient and moderate lateral curvature, this non-equilibrium flow is relevant to marine applications as well as short-haul urban transportation. The wall-pressure spectrum and its scaling are discussed, along with its relation to the space-time structure. As the flow decelerates downstream, the root-mean-square level of the pressure drops together with the wall shear stress (t(w)) and is consistently approximately 7t(w). While the associated dimensional spectra see a broadband reduction of over 15 dB per Hz, they appear to attain a single functional form, collapsing to within 2 dB when normalized with the wall-wake scaling where t(w) is the pressure scale and U-e/d is the frequency scale. Here, d is the boundary layer thickness and U-e is the local free-stream velocity. The general success of the wall-wake scaling, including in the viscous f(-5) region, suggests that the large-scale motions in the outer layer play a predominant role in the near-wall turbulence and wall pressure. On investigating further, we find that the instantaneous wall-pressure fluctuations are characterized by a quasi-periodic feature that appears to convect downstream at speeds consistent with the outer peak in the turbulence stresses. The conditional structure of this feature, estimated through peak detection in the time series, resembles that of a roller, supporting the embedded shear layer hypothesis (Schatzman & Thomas, J. Fluid Mech., vol. 815, 2017, pp. 592-642; Balantrapu et al., J. Fluid Mech., vol. 929, 2021, A9). Therefore, the outer-region shear-layer-type motions may be important when devising strategies for flow control, drag and noise reduction for decelerating boundary layers.