Fluid-Acoustics Interaction in Self-Sustained Oscillations Over a Cavity in a Turbulent Boundary Layer

Self-sustained oscillations with fluid-acoustics interaction over a cavity can radiate intense tonal sound and fatigue nearby components of industrial products. The prediction and the suppression of these oscillations are very important for many practical applications. However, the fluid-acoustics interaction has not been thoroughly clarified in particular for the oscillations in turbulent flows. We investigate the mechanism of the oscillations over a rectangular cavity with a length-to-depth ratio of 2:1 by directly solving the compressible Navier-Stokes equations. The boundary layer over the cavity is turbulent and the freestream Mach numbers are M = 0.4 and 0.7. The results clarify that the self-sustained oscillations occur in the shear layer of the cavity and the oscillations are reinforced by the streamwise acoustic mode in the cavity for both Mach numbers. The shear layer of the cavity undulates. This undulation causes the deformation of fine vortices in the shear layer and radiates acoustic waves from the downstream edge of the cavity. Also, we clarify by the conditional identification of longitudinal vortices that the acoustic waves cause the undulation of the shear layer and a feedback loop is formed. Moreover, the comparison of the flow field over the cavity with that over a simple backstep shows that the shear layer in the cavity becomes two-dimensional by the acoustic feedback. Finally, we show that the oscillations become weaker particularly at M = 0.4 and the frequencies of the oscillations become lower as the boundary layer thickness at the upstream edge of the cavity increases. Considering this effect of the boundary layer thickness, the peak frequencies predicted by our computations are in good agreement with those measured in a past experiment.