Active control of sound radiated by a submarine hull in axisymmetric vibration using inertial actuators

This paper investigates the use of inertial actuators to reduce the sound radiated by a submarine hull under excitation from the propeller. The axial forces from the propeller are tonal at the blade passing frequency. The hull is modeled as a fluid-loaded cylindrical shell with ring stiffeners and equally spaced bulkheads. The cylinder is closed at each end by circular plates and conical end caps. The forces from the propeller are transmitted to the hull by a rigid foundation connected to the propeller shaft. Inertial actuators are used as the structural control inputs. The actuators are arranged in circumferential arrays and attached to the internal end plates of the hull. Two active control techniques corresponding to active vibration control and discrete structural acoustic sensing are implemented to attenuate the structural and acoustic responses of the submarine. In the latter technique, error information on the radiated sound fields is provided by a discrete structural acoustic sensor. An acoustic transfer function is defined to estimate the far field sound pressure from a single point measurement on the hull. The inertial actuators are shown to provide control forces with a magnitude large enough to reduce the sound due to hull vibration. © 2012 American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Sound radiation from point-excited structures: Comparison of plate and sphere

Acoustic radiation from a structure can be expressed in terms of modal radiation and modal coefficients. This paper investigates the contributions of these two modal properties to radiation excited by a point force. Sound radiation from two basic structures is considered: a baffled rectangular plate and a closed spherical shell. The plate behaviour is familiar, and governed by the relation between the natural frequency of a mode and its coincidence frequency. For a closed spherical shell, there are either zero or two critical frequencies, depending on the radius and thickness. When there are two the shell radiates well both above and below the two frequencies, and poorly in the frequency range between them. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The silent base flow and the sound sources in a laminar jet.

An algorithm to compute the silent base flow sources of sound in a jet is introduced. The algorithm is based on spatiotemporal filtering of the flow field and is applicable to multifrequency sources. It is applied to an axisymmetric laminar jet and the resulting sources are validated successfully. The sources are compared to those obtained from two classical acoustic analogies, based on quiescent and time-averaged base flows. The comparison demonstrates how the silent base flow sources shed light on the sound generation process. It is shown that the dominant source mechanism in the axisymmetric laminar jet is "shear-noise," which is a linear mechanism. The algorithm presented here could be applied to fully turbulent flows to understand the aerodynamic noise-generation mechanism.