Scattering of sound by an elastic plate with flow

Abstract An elastic plate, set in an infinite baffle and immersed in a fluid moving with a uniform subsonic velocity, is excited by an acoustic source. The scattered sound field is analyzed when fluid-plate coupling is large, and a solution is found by the use of matched asymptotic expansions. The far field is found to approximate to the solution obtained when the elastic plate is absent. At a plate resonance, however, the outer field must include eigensolutions with singularities at the plate edges, and close to the plate the dominant terms are travelling plate waves. These plate waves are found to have a wavelength independent of the frequency of the source. It is also shown that a plate resonance corresponds to a divergence instability of aerodynamic flutter theory and that the stability results found in this paper are in agreement with those obtained by using modal expansions. The limit as the Mach number goes to zero is found to be singular, suggesting an analysis of the model for small flow velocity. This calculation is performed and the results match smoothly to the respective solutions for a stationary fluid and for a large subsonic flow.