Experimental study of a tip leakage flow: wavelet analysis of pressure fluctuations

A wavelet-based conditional analysis of unsteady flow and sound signals highlights the role of intermittent perturbations both in the sound generation and the unsteady field of an aerofoil tip leakage flow experiment. It is shown how the most probable flow perturbations generated at the pressure side tip edge are convected through the gap and swept downstream along the suction side past the trailing edge tip corner, where they radiate sound. The nascent sound sources are identified and localized in the clearance between 40% and 60% of the chord. It is also found that the time dependence of the averaged intermittent structures scales with the inverse of the square root of the mean velocity and a physical interpretation based on a simple potential vortex model is proposed. The data are retrieved from an experiment that has been carried out at low Mach number (Ma < 0.3) in an anechoic test facility. A single motionless instrumented NACA 5510 aerofoil was mounted into the potential core of an open rectangular jet between two plates with an adjustable clearance. The tip leakage flow was ensured by the 5% camber and a 15° angle of attack. A large database obtained by a variety of measurement techniques is thus available for the present analysis. More specifically, the conditional approach is applied to joint far field, wall pressure and particle image velocimetry (PIV) measurements. The wall pressure probes are located along the suction side tip edge and on the tip inside the gap, whereas the PIV plane is parallel to the mid-gap plane. Additional joint wall pressure and single hot-wire anemometry (HWA) measurements are also analysed with a hot-wire probe located near the trailing edge tip corner. The conditional averaging is triggered by high-energy wavelet events selected in a reference signal by setting a threshold to the so-called local intermittency measure.