This paper considers the effect of flow advection on entropy waves. The interest is in whether entropy waves persist in gas turbine combustors, between the flame, where they are generated, and the combustor exit, where their acceleration generates acoustic waves (known as ‘entropy noise’ or ‘indirect combustion noise’). Entropy wave advection within a simplified fully developed turbulent channel-flow simulation is investigated. Entropy wave dissipation is found to be negligible, with loss of entropy wave strength caused predominantly by mean flow shear dispersion. The impulse response of entropy perturbations downstream of where they are generated is shown to be well modelled by a Gaussian profile in time. This yields a (different) Gaussian form for the inlet–outlet transfer function of entropy perturbations. For representative gas turbine flows, the magnitude of this transfer function is such that significant entropy wave strength will remain at the combustor exit, confirming that entropy-generated acoustic waves are likely to be important.

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The development and transmission of sound through the exit of an aeroengine combustor is often investigated by modelling the complex geometry as a convergent-divergent nozzle. However, these analytical acoustic predictions are usually limited to the compact case, where the length of the nozzle is insignificant compared to the wavelength of the flow perturbations, or to cases where the variation of the mean velocity through the nozzle may be treated as linear, or piece-wise linear. Considering terms up to first order in frequency for the conservation of mass, momentum and energy, this paper investigates an alternative approach by deriving effective lengths for the passage of the flow perturbations through a supercritical convergent-divergent nozzle. The effects due to the presence of a normal shock wave are also studied using a linearised form of the Rankine-Hugoniot relations. The analyses lead to predictions for the phase and magnitude of the transmitted acoustic waves from finite-length nozzles, and are valid for low non-dimensional frequencies. It has been found that these predictions agree well with the numerical results from inviscid simulations.

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