On the Combined Effect of Mean Flow and Acoustic Excitation on Structural Response and Radiation

Numerical experiments in two dimensions are carried out in order to investigate the response of a typical aircraft structure to a mean flow and an acoustic excitation. Two physical problems are considered; one in which the acoustic excitation is applied on one side of the flexible structure and the mean flow is on the other side while in the second problem both the mean flow and acoustic excitation are on the same side. Subsonic and supersonic mean flows are considered together with a random and harmonic acoustic excitation. In the first physical problem and using a random acoustic excitation, the results show that at low excitation levels the response is unaffected by the mean flow Mach number. However, at high excitation levels the structural response is significantly reduced by increasing the Mach number. In particular, both the shift in the frequency response spectrum and the broadening of the peaks are reduced. In the second physical problem, the results show that the response spectrum is dominated by the lower modes (1 and 3) for the subsonic mean flow case and by the higher modes (5 and 7) in the supersonic case. When a harmonic excitation is used, it is found that in the subsonic case the power spectral density of the structural response shows a subharmonic (f/4) while in the supersonic case no subharmonic is obtained.