Wind tunnel noise reduction at Mach 5 with a rod-wall sound shield

A method of shielding a wind-tunnel model from noise radiated by the tunnel-wall boundary layer has been developed and tested at the Langley Research Center. The shield consists of a rectangular array of longitudinal rods with boundary-layer suction through gaps between the rods. Tests were conducted at Mach 5 over a unit Reynolds number range of 1.0-3.5 x 10 to the 7th/m. Hot-wire measurements indicated the freestream noise, expressed in terms of the rms pressure fluctuations normalized by the mean pressure, was reduced from about 1.4 percent just upstream of the shielded region of a minimum level of about 0.4 percent in the forward portion of the shielded flow.