Forced oscillation phenomenon of normal/oblique shock trains in a rectangular duct at Mach 2 and 3

Abstract

The forced shock train oscillation is a common phenomenon in a practical working scramjet isolator. To evaluate the similarities and differences between the forced normal shock train oscillation and the forced oblique shock train oscillation, experiments were conducted in a rectangular duct at Mach 2 and 3. The normal/oblique shock trains were forced to oscillate for different back-pressure levels by changing the mechanical throttling ratio. High-frequency pressure measurements were mainly utilized for data acquisition and analysis. The frequency contents, the intermittency characteristics and the perturbation propagation of forced shock train oscillations were investigated in this work. Experimental results illustrate that the forced oscillation at Mach 3 is a composite pattern, which is dominated by the excited frequency and coupled with the inherent unsteadiness. This phenomenon is not obvious for the forced oscillation at Mach 2. For the forced oscillations at Mach 2 and 3, the maximum zero-crossing frequency is close to the downstream excitation frequency, and the whole intermittent region almost holds this value, which is very different from the self-excited oscillation pattern. By using the cross-spectral analysis, the frequency-dependent correlation was evaluated. It shows that the excitations and its harmonic contents can propagate upstream to affect the intermittent region and its downstream. Besides the excitation frequency and its harmonic contents, low-frequency contents (tens to more than a hundred Hz) can propagate nearby the separation region, and the propagation to downstream the separation bubble is very weak. Considering the time-lag between different transducers, the propagation speed of perturbations can be obtained. It implies that the propagation speed is independent of the magnitude of the back-pressure, but affected by the velocity of the incoming flow. Specifically, the higher the freestream Mach number is, the greater the propagation speed will be.