Numerical Simulations of High-Speed Turbulent Cavity Flows

Detached-Eddy Simulations (DES) of flows over clean and controlled cavities with and without doors are presented in this paper. Mach and Reynolds numbers (based on cavity length) were 0.85 and one million respectively. Spectral analyses showed that the DES computations were able to correctly predict the frequencies of the Rossiter modes for both uncontrolled and controlled cases. Flow visualisations revealed that the impact of the shear layer formed along the cavity on a slanted aft wall no longer creates a large source of acoustic noise. Therefore little acoustic propagation was seen up the cavity. This was confirmed by the analysis of the cavity wall forces, which showed that the oscillations of the shear layer were reduced when the wall was slanted. This aided in reducing the overall Sound Pressure Levels throughout the cavity and far-field. Comparisons of the flow-fields suggested that the addition of the doors also aided in stabilising the shear layer, which was also shown in the analysis of the wall forces. As a result, the addition of the doors was found to affect the clean cavity configuration significantly more than the controlled one.