Experimental investigations were carried out to study the acoustic radiation from a rectangular wall mounted cavity in a confined supersonic flow. The free-stream Mach number was maintained at 1·5 and the cavity length-to-depth ratio was varied from 0·43 to 5·0. Acoustic measurements made on the top wall show jumps in the dominant frequency as the cavity behaviour changes from shallow-to-square-to-deep cavity. Numerical simulations of this unsteady two-dimensional flow using the commercially available software FLUENT have also been carried out. Unsteady pressure data at the same location in the flow field as the pressure transducers in the experiments was collected. FFT analysis of the unsteady pressure data was performed to obtain the dominant acoustic frequencies. The values for these dominant frequencies predicted by the numerical calculations agree well with experimental data. The numerical study also predicts the frequency jump observed in experiments.

This paper describes an experimental investigation of the effect of transverse liquid injection (distilled water) on the acoustic field generated by confined supersonic flow past a cavity. The effect of cavity depth in the absence/ presence of liquid injection on the acoustic field is studied. In the presence of liquid injection, the effects of injection pressure and injection location on the acoustic field are investigated. The dependence of suppression/amplification of the acoustic amplitudes (compared with the absence of injection) on the injection condition and cavity depths is ascertained. In general, liquid injection in the presence of cavity resulted in higher amplitudes. Even square cavities that did not exhibit oscillations in the absence of injection generated significant acoustic amplitudes in the presence of liquid injection at high injection pressures. Phase-locked schlieren imaging was performed to sequence the fluiddynamic events. Schlieren images indicate the interaction of the shock wave generated by the flow past the liquid jet and the oblique shock generated at the cavity-leading edge. The schlieren images show that the amplitude increase observed for higher injection pressures for a range of cavity depths is accompanied by an unsteady normal shock ahead of the cavity-leading edge (which does not span the entire width of the test model, but is located locally in front of the liquid jet).