Coherence decay and its impact on sound radiation by wavepackets

Wavepackets obtained by a linear stability analysis of the turbulent mean flow were shown in recent works to agree closely with some relevant statistics of turbulent jets, such as power spectral densities and averaged phases of flow fluctuations. However, when such wavepacket models were used to calculate the far-field sound, satisfactory agreement was only obtained for flows that were supersonic relative to the ambient speed of sound; attempts with subsonic flows led to errors of more than an order of magnitude. We investigate here the reasons for such discrepancies by developing the integral solution of the Helmholtz equation in terms of the cross-spectral densities of turbulent quantities. It is shown that agreement of a statistical source, such as would be obtained by the above-mentioned wavepacket models, in averaged amplitudes and phases in the near field is not a sufficient condition for exact agreement of the far-field sound. The sufficient condition is that, in addition to the amplitudes and phases, the statistical source should also match the coherence function of the flow fluctuations. This is exemplified in a model problem, where we show that the effect of coherence decay on sound radiation is more prominent for subsonic convection velocities, and its neglect leads to discrepancies of more than an order of magnitude in the far-field sound. For supersonic flows errors are reduced for the peak noise direction, but for other angles the coherence decay is also seen to have a significant effect. Coherence decay in the model source is seen to lead to similar decays in the coherence of two points in the far acoustic field, these decays being significantly faster for higher Mach numbers. The limitations of linear wavepacket models are illustrated with another simplified problem, showing that superposition of time-periodic solutions can lead to a correlation decay between two points. However, the coherence between any pair of points in such models remains unity, and cannot thus represent the behaviour observed in turbulent flows.