Abstract
This work provides an experimental investigation into the interaction between a jet flow and a semi-finite plate parallel to the jet. Wall pressure fluctuations have been measured in a high compressible subsonic regime and for different distances between the jet and the plate trailing edge. The experiment has been carried out in the ISVR anechoic Doak Laboratory at the University of Southampton, using wall pressure transducers flush mounted on the plate surface. Signals were acquired in the stream-wise direction along the jet centreline and in the span-wise direction in a region close to the trailing edge. The radial position of the flat plate was fixed very close to the jet axis to simulate a realistic jet–wing configuration. The plate was moved axially in order to investigate four different jet-trailing edge distances and to include measurements upstream of the nozzle exhaust. The acquired database was analyzed in both the frequency and the time domains providing an extensive statistical characterization in terms of spectral uni– and multi–variate quantities as well as high order statistical moments. A wavelet analysis was performed as well to investigate the time evolution of the wall pressure events.
Introduction
The reduction of aircraft noise and fuel consumption has become a key issue for manufacturers in the design of modern aicraft engines. In order to pinpoint a compromise between thrust and fuel consumption, the current tendency is to increase the engine bypass ratio, a solution that, as an indirect benefit, leads to a reduction of the overall noise 1 due to the lower exhaust velocity. The drawback of this configuration is the very large size of the nacelle diameter, which results in the engine being placed very close to the wing in order to maintain the same ground clearance. Such a closely-coupled architecture leads to a stronger interaction between the exhaust flow and the wing as well as a modification of the jet noise generation and propagation mechanisms. These effects are no longer predictable using consolidated models developed for isolated jets. For these reasons, many experimental and numerical studies have been carried out in the last few years to investigate installation noise.2–7 Studies on simplified jet-flat plate configurations remain important to provide fundamental physical understandings both from the aerodynamic8–11 and the acoustic standpoint. To this extent, the shielding/scattering effect of the airframe surface have been investigated by researchers12,13 whereas near-field and far-field noise generated by a jet installed close to a semi-finite plate has been analyzed by Lawrence et al. 14
Wall pressure fluctuations induced by the jet over an infinite flat plate have been extensively investigated in literature8,15–18 for the prediction of the vibro-acoustic response of the aircraft surfaces.
The statistical analysis of jet-induced wall pressure fluctuations is also the subject of the present work where the stream issued by a highly compressible subsonic jet flow convects across a semi-finite plate. The main novelty proposed herein is the parametric study carried out in terms of the axial distance between the nozzle exit plane and the trailing edge, an issue that has never been investigated before even though it is of interest for realistic jet-wing installation architectures.
The reported investigation was performed under static ambient flow conditions at a jet Mach number M = 0.75. The plate was positioned at
Details about the experimental setup are given in Sec. II and the results dealing with the pressure statistics are reported in Sec. III. Final conclusions are presented in Sec. IV.
Experimental setup
Measurements were performed in the ISVR Doak Laboratory at the University of Southampton where a 1/50th model scale jet was installed. The ISVR Doak Laboratory is an anechoic chamber, fully anechoic above 400 Hz. The facility has dimensions approximately of 15 m-long, 7 m-wide and 5 m-high. The air jet is supplied by a high-pressure compressor reservoir system, with a maximum pressure of 20 Bar. Further details about the facility are reported in literature.11,14 The experiment comprised an horizontal flat plate installed close to a single stream, unheated jet, under static ambient flow conditions. The jet diameter (D) measures 38.1 mm and the spreading half angle, evaluated via hot-wire measurement of the jet velocity field, is around

Experimental setup. Colored lines show the different nozzle exhaust positions from the TE: 1)
Wall pressure measurements were performed via flush-mounted wall pressure transducers (Kulite Type XT-190) with a sensing diameter of 2 mm. The signals were acquired at a sampling frequency of 44 kHz and for a time of 10 s. The investigations were performed at a radial position of the flat plate
The wall pressure measurement domain in the stream-wise direction varies from
Results
The wall pressure fluctuations were analyzed in the frequency domain using the Sound Pressure Spectrum Level (SPSL) evaluated, according to literature,
20
using the following equation:
PSD is the power spectral density computed using the Welch method,
In Figure 2, the axial evolution of the pressure autospectra is presented. The wall pressure transducer axial locations were measured from the frame of reference fixed at the nozzle exhaust. In Figure 2(a), the first two spectra are acquired by pressure transducers mounted upstream of the nozzle exhaust. A series of peaks were detected over a range of Strouhal numbers that varies between

Wall pressure autospectra axial evolution for all the different configurations: (a)
To gain a global point of view of the wall pressure fluctuation intensity over the plate surface for the different configurations, the Overall Sound Pressure Level (OASPL) was evaluated according to the following definition:

OASPL stream-wise evolution.
In agreement with the pressure autospectra, the OASPL energy content increases with increasing distance from the nozzle exit until the jet impact point is reached. The jet plate impact point is estimated using the jet spreading angle for the free jet case. Indeed, a constant trend of the OASPL is found in the configuration
This behavior is confirmed by analysis of high order statistical moments, namely skewness (s) and kurtosis (k), which are computed as follows:

(a) Skewness stream-wise evolution. (b) Kurtosis stream-wise evolution.
The kurtosis trend, reported in Figure 4(b), qualitatively follows the OASPL evolution of Figure 3. Kurtosis values close to three are detected for the kulites positioned upstream of the nozzle exhaust, thus in an acoustic near field and not influenced by jet turbulent structures. Furthermore, the variation of the plate trailing edge from the nozzle exhaust does not make a detectable effect on the upstream kurtosis values. While moving downstream, the development of the boundary layer over the plate is characterized by an increase in intermittency, typical of turbulent flows, which is seen in the regions where the kurtosis is larger than 3.
The two-point statistics of the jet induced wall pressure fluctuations have been investigated in the time domain via the cross-correlation function computed between two contiguous pressure transducers. The cross-correlation is defined as:

Wall pressure stream-wise cross-correlations for all the different configurations: (a)
It is interesting to note that for the configurations
The time lag τ at which the cross-correlation peak is located, and the separation between the transducers ξ, can be combined to compute the stream-wise phase velocity

Axial evolution of the phase velocity.
The tow-point statistics are further explored in the frequency domain by the computation of the spectral coherence function evaluated as follows
26
The coherence spectra computed for stream-wise separations as functions of the normalized angular frequency

Wall pressure stream-wise coherences for all the different configurations: (a)
According to literature, in the case of fully developed TBL, an exponential decay of the coherence function is expected. In the present cases, an exponential-like decay is observed for the cases LTE > 2 (Figure 7(b) to (d)) and for the largest x/D. In the other cases, corresponding to transducers positioned upstream of or close to the nozzle exhaust, a flat or oscillatory trend is observed. This is an indication of the absence of hydrodynamic fluctuations which become relevant only downstream of the nozzle exhaust.
A similar trend is observed in the span-wise direction. The coherence function

Wall pressure span-wise coherences for all the different configurations: (a)
It can be concluded that, according to previous studies on an infinite flat plate,8,17 in the region where the jet flow interacts with the plate, theoretical models proposed for canonical TBL to predict the coherence decay can be applied successfully. As a reference example, Corcos’ model
27
can be considered. This approach predicts a purely exponential decay of the coherence function according to the following formulation,
The first two exponential terms refer to the stream-wise and span-wise wall pressure coherence length respectively and the last exponential term accounts for the mean pressure field. Taking into account the fact that the coherence decay takes on an exponential form only where a turbulent boundary layer exists, a comparison against the Corcos’ fit is made using the experimental data at the trailing edge for the configuration

Comparison between experimental data and Corcos’ fit at x/D = 9.21 and
For modelling purposes, another important quantity that can be obtained from the span-wise coherence is the span-wise correlation length whose definition is as follows:
This quantity is important as it is the input to analytical models able to predict the sound scattered to the far field.
28
Figure 10 shows the correlation lengths in the span-wise direction for all the different studied configurations. Apart for

Span-wise integral coherence lengths.
The consistent decrease of the coherence length scale with plate length may suggest that a very small turbulent boundary layer increases with L/D. To make this assertion more robust, further investigations are necessary.
In order to further describe the statical properties of the pressure fluctuations, a time-frequency investigation is carried out by application of the continuous wavelet transform (CWT). The CWT consists of a projection of a given signal over a basis of compact support functions obtained by the translation and dilatation of a so-called mother wavelet. The wavelet transform can be formalized as follows18,29
Figure 11 reports examples of the time-frequency representation of the wavelet scalogram obtained by the square of the wavelet coefficients. The signal taken at

Wavelet scalograms: (a)
Figure 11(c) corresponds to a transducer located close to the trailing edge in the configuration
Conclusions
An experimental study has been carried out to investigate the interaction between a subsonic single stream compressible jet and a semi-finite flat plate parallel to the jet axis. The plate was installed very close to the jet in order to be representative of a scaled modern aircraft jet-wing configuration. The focus of this work is on the wall pressure fluctuations induced by the jet over the plate surface and the dependency of their statistics on the axial distance between the jet nozzle and the plate trailing edge. For this purpose, the radial jet-plate separation is kept constant and four different axial distances LTE of the nozzle exhaust from the plate trailing edge are considered.
The investigation was performed in an anechoic environment using an array of flush-mounted wall pressure transducers positioned in the stream-wise direction along the jet axis and in the span-wise direction close to the plate trailing edge.
The analysis in the Fourier and physical domains shows the relevant influence of the parameter
An intermediate region is then identified close to the point where the jet flow impacts the plate. The OASPL increases and the statistics become strongly non-Gaussian. In the positions downstream of the jet nozzle exit, but upstream of the impact point, the trace of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability is apparently observed as well.
Further downstream and for increasing
Analysis of the wavelet scalogram in the time-frequency domain shows that, in the region where the jet interacts with the plate, a random distribution of energy events is detected both in time and frequency. This is in agreement with the broadband nature of the Fourier spectra observed at these positions. In the other regions on the plate, it is observed that both the upstream and the downstream travelling modes, even though localized in terms of frequency, are intermittent in their temporal evolution. Energy bumps are indeed seen to appear at about constant frequency but randomly in time.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
