Hydrodynamic sources of the vortex sound in a two-dimensional shear layer

Development of advanced noise reduction devices requires an in-depth understanding of two fundamental questions: what are the true noise sources and how are the acoustic radiations generated. An accurate separation of the hydrodynamic and acoustic fluctuations helps to reveal the answers, but no consensus exists on its feasibility in the near-field source region of compressible flows. This study proposes a methodology to examine the dynamics of vortex sound generation in a two-dimensional artificially excited subsonic mixing layer. The parabolized stability equation (PSE) is applied to resolve the hydrodynamic fluctuations and the vortex sound theory is used to predict the acoustic pressures. Numerical simulations show that the PSE solutions capture the vortex pairing reasonably accurately and damp the acoustic modes to a negligible level, and that the vortex sound theory recovers the acoustic pressures. Good agreement of both solutions with the direct simulations indicates that a physically reasonable separation of hydrodynamic sources is achieved and can be used to further examine the vortex dynamics and noise source mechanisms.