Self-sustained oscillations of shear flow past a slotted plate coupled with cavity resonance

Shear flow past a slotted plate configuration can give rise to highly coherent, self-sustained oscillations when coupling occurs with a resonant mode of an adjacent cavity. The distinctive feature of these oscillations is that the wavelength of the coherent instability along the plate is of the order of the plate length. This observation is in contrast to previous investigations of flow past perforated or slotted surfaces, where the instability scales on the diameter of the perforation or the gap length of a slot. The present oscillations occur even when the inflow boundary layer is turbulent and an inflectional form of the shear flow cannot develop along the cavity opening, due to the presence of the slotted plate. Instigation of a resonant mode of the cavity, in conjunction with an inherent instability of the shear flow along the plate, gives rise to ordered clusters of instantaneous vorticity and instantaneous velocity correlation. During the oscillation, ejection of flow occurs from the cavity to the region of the shear flow; this ejection is in accord with the convection of the large-scale cluster of vorticity along the slotted plate. This oscillation can be effectively detuned by adjusting the inflow velocity, such that the inherent instability of the shear flow past the slotted plate is no longer coincident with the resonant frequency of the cavity. Certain features of this self-sustained oscillation are directly analogous to recent findings of oscillations due to shear flow past a perforated plate bounded by a cavity, but in the absence of cavity resonance effects. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.