Jovan Nedic

Aeroacoustic performance of fractal spoilers

One of the major environmental problems facing the aviation industry is that of aircraft noise. The work presented in this paper, done as part of the EU’s OPENAIR Project, looks at reducing spoiler noise whilst maintaining lift and drag characteristics through means of large-scale fractal porosity. It is hypothesised that the highly turbulent flow generated by fractal grids, which have multiple-length-scales, would reduce the impact of the re-circulation region and with it, the low frequency noise it generates. In its place, a higher frequency noise is introduced which is more susceptible to atmospheric attenuation and could be deemed less offensive to the human ear. A total of nine laboratory scaled spoilers were looked at, seven of which had a fractal design, one with a regular grid design and one solid for reference. The spoilers were inclined at an angle of 30 ◦ . Force, acoustic and flow visualisation experiments on a flat plate were carried out, where it was found that the present fractal spoilers reduce the low frequency noise by 2.5dB. Results show that it is possible to improve the acoustic performance by modifying a number of parameters defining the fractal spoiler, some of them very sensitively. From these experiments, two fractal spoilers were chosen for a detailed aero-acoustic study on a three-element wing system, where it was found that the fractal spoilers had a 1dB reduction in the sound pressure level and were also able to maintain the amount of lift and drag generated by the wing system.

The spatial origin of −5/3 spectra in grid-generated turbulence

A combined wind tunnel and computational study of grid-generated turbulence along the centreline shows that the close to −5/3 power law signature of energy spectra in the frequency domain originates relatively close to the grid not only where the velocity derivative statistics become quite suddenly isotropic but also where the turbulent fluctuating velocities are very intermittent and non-Gaussian. As the inlet flow velocity increases, these power laws are increasingly well defined and increasingly close to −5/3 over an increasing range of frequencies. However, this range continuously decreases with streamwise distance from the grid even though the local Reynolds number first increases and then decreases along the same streamwise extent. The intermittency at the point of origin of the close to −5/3 power spectra consists of alternations between intense vortex tube clusters with shallow broad-band spectra and quiescent regions where the velocity fluctuations are smooth with steep energy spectra.

Geometrical influence on vortex shedding in turbulent axisymmetric wakes

We investigate the structures generated by the vortex shedding mechanism in turbulent axisymmetric wakes of non-axisymmetric plates, including a square plate and a series of fractal plates, and compare the results to a disk. For a given characteristic length l, all plates have the same frontal area A, since l = A0.5, but the length of the perimeter and the irregularity of the perimeter were varied in a fractal manner thus allowing us to investigate the effect of boundary conditions. Measurements were taken over a large range of downstream and radial distances in order to obtain a more robust measure for the vortex shedding energy. It was found that the fractal plates are able to reduce the vortex shedding energy by as much as 60% compared to the disk and square plates. It was also found that the frequency at which the vortex shedding structures are generated and the manner in which they organise themselves in the wake are independent of the boundary conditions of the wake generator. The results suggest th...

Influence of the spatial resolution on fine-scale features in DNS of turbulence generated by a single square grid

We focus in this paper on the effect of the resolution of direct numerical simulations (DNS) on the spatio-temporal development of the turbulence downstream of a single square grid. The aims of this study are to validate our numerical approach by comparing experimental and numerical one-point statistics downstream of a single square grid and then investigate how the resolution is impacting the dynamics of the flow. In particular, using the Q–R diagram, we focus on the interaction between the strain-rate and rotation tensors, the symmetric and skew-symmetric parts of the velocity gradient tensor, respectively. We first show good agreement between our simulations and hot-wire experiment for one-point statistics on the centreline of the single square grid. Then, by analysing the shape of the Q–R diagram for various streamwise locations, we evaluate the ability of under-resolved DNS to capture the main features of the turbulence downstream of the single square grid.

Drag and near wake characteristics of flat plates normal to the flow with fractal edge geometries

Past results have suggested that the drag coefficient and the shedding frequencies of regular polygon plates all fall within a very narrow band of values. In this study, we introduce a variety of length scales into the perimeter of a square plate and study the effects this has on the wake characteristics and overall drag. The perimeter of the plate can be made as long as allowed by practical constraints with as many length scales as desired under these constraints without changing the area of the plate. A total of eight fractal-perimeter plates were developed, split into two families of different fractal dimensions all of which had the same frontal area. It is found that by increasing the number of fractal iterations and thus the perimeter, the drag coefficient increases by up to 7%. For the family of fractal plates with the higher dimension, it is also found that when the perimeter increases above a certain threshold the drag coefficient drops back again. Furthermore, the shedding frequency remains the same but the intensity of the shedding decreases with increasing fractal dimension. The size of the wake also decreases with increasing fractal dimension and has some dependence on iteration without changing the area of the plate.

Energy dissipation scaling in uniformly sheared turbulence.

The rate of turbulent kinetic energy dissipation in spatially developing, uniformly sheared turbulence is examined experimentally. In the far-downstream fully developed region of the flow, we confirm that the dissipation parameter C(ɛ) is constant. More importantly, however, we find two upstream regions where this parameter could be scaled with the local turbulent Reynolds number as C(ɛ)=ARe(λ)(α); the exponents in these two regions are, respectively, α=-0.6 and 0.5. The observed changes in scaling laws are explained by consideration of structural changes in the turbulence.

Aero-Acoustic Performance of Fractal Spoilers

One of the major environmental problems facing the aviation industry is that of aircraft noise. The work presented in this paper, done as part of the EU’s OPENAIR Project, looks at reducing spoiler noise whilst maintaining aerodynamic performance, through means of large-scale fractal porosity. It is hypothesised that the highly turbulent flow generated by fractal grids from the way the multiple-length-scales are organised in space, would reduce the impact of the re-circulation region and with it, the low frequency noise it generates. In its place, a higher frequency noise is introduced which is more susceptible to atmospheric attenuation and is less offensive to the human ear. A total of nine laboratory scaled spoilers were looked at, seven of which had a fractal design, one with a regular grid design and one solid for reference. The spoilers were inclined at an angle of 30◦. Force, acoustic and flow visualisation experiments on a flat plate were carried out and it was found that the present fractal spoilers reduce the low frequency noise by 2.5dB. Results show that it is possible to improve the acoustic performance by modifying a number of parameters defining the fractal spoiler, some of them very sensitively. From these experiments, two fractal spoilers were chosen for a detailed aero-acoustic study on a three-element wing system, where it was found that the fractal spoilers had a reduction of up to 4dB in the sound pressure level while maintaining similar aerodynamic performances as conventional solid spoilers on the measured wing system.