Industrial jet noise: Coanda nozzles

Abstract

Within the U.K. manufacturing industries noise from industrial jets ranks third as a major contributor to industrial deafness. Noise control is hindered because use is made of the air once it has exuded from the nozzle exit. Important tasks include swarf removal, paint spreading, cooling, etc. Nozzles which employ the Coanda effect appear to offer the possibility of significant noise reduction whilst maintaining high thrust efficiency when compared with the commonly used simple open pipe or ordinary convergent nozzle. In this paper the performance of Coanda-type nozzles is examined in detail and an index rating for nozzle performance is introduced. Results show that far field stagnation pressure distributions are Gaussian and similar in all cases with a dispersion coefficient σ = 0·64. Noise reduction and thrust efficiency are shown to be closely related to the design geometry of the central body of the nozzle. Performance is based on four fundamental characteristics, these being the noise level at 1 m from the exit and at a 90° station to the nozzle axis, and the thrust on a chosen profile, the noise reduction and the thrust efficiency. Physically, performance is attributed to flow near field effects where, although all nozzles are choked, shock cell associated noise is absent.