Acoustic Response of Multiple Shallow Cavities and Prediction of Self-Excited Acoustic Oscillations

Self-sustaining oscillations of flow over ducted cavities and in corrugated pipes are a known source of tonal noise and excessive vibration in industrial applications. Corrugated pipes can be modeled as a series of axisymmetric cavities. In the current study, the aero-acoustic sources generated by one-, two-, and three-cavity configurations have been experimentally investigated by means of the standing wave method (SWM) for a wide range of Strouhal numbers and acoustic excitation levels. The source strength is found to increase in a nonlinear manner with increasing the number of cavities. Moreover, the self-excited acoustic resonances of the same cavity combinations are investigated. The source characteristics are compared with the observed lock-in range from the self-excited experiments. A prediction model is also developed to utilize the measured source characteristics for estimating the amplitude of the cavities self-sustained oscillations. The self-excited experimental data are used to assess the effect of acoustic absorption at the cavity edges. This absorption is found to be substantial and must be accounted for in the prediction model. When the model is supplemented with appropriate loss coefficients, it predicts fairly well the pulsation amplitude within the resonance lock-in range of the studied multiple cavity configurations.