Experimental Investigation of the Acoustic Power Around Two Tandem Cylinders

Aeroacoustic resonance of bluff bodies exposed to cross flow can be problematic for many different engineering applications and knowledge of the location and interaction of acoustic sources is not well understood. Thus, an empirical investigation of the acoustically coupled flow around two tandem cylinders under two different resonant conditions is presented. It is assumed that the resonant acoustic field could be decoupled from the hydrodynamic flow field, resolved separately, and then recoupled to predict the flow/sound interaction mechanisms using Howe's theory of aerodynamic sound. Particle image velocimetry was employed to resolve the phase-averaged flow field characteristics around the cylinders at various phases in an acoustic wave cycle. It was found that the vortex shedding patterns of the two resonant conditions exhibit substantial differences. For the first condition, which occurred at low flow velocities where the natural vortex shedding frequency was below the acoustic resonance frequency, fully developed vortices formed in both the gap region between the cylinders and in the wake. These vortices were found to be in phase with each other. For the second resonant condition, which occurred at higher flow velocities where the natural vortex shedding frequency was above the acoustic resonant frequency, fully developed vortices only formed in the wake and shedding from the two cylinders were not in phase. These differences in the flow field resulted in substantial variation in the flow-acoustic interaction mechanisms between the two resonant conditions. Corresponding patterns of the net acoustic energy suggest that acoustic resonance at the lower flow velocity is due to a combination of shear layer instability in the gap and vortex shedding in the wake, while acoustic resonance at the higher flow velocity is driven by the vortex shedding in the wake of the two cylinders.