Phase velocities of plane waves in a pipe with a flow whose velocity varies along the radius

Abstract

The phase velocities of plane waves in a pipe filled with a moving acoustic medium are studied for different laws of flow velocity variation along the pipe radius. The wave equation is solved by the discretization method, which breaks the entire pipe volume into individual cylinders under the assumption that, within each of the cylinders, the flow velocity of the medium is constant. This approach makes it possible to reduce the solution to the wave problem to solving Helmholtz equations for individual cylinders. Based on boundary conditions satisfied at the boundaries between neighboring cylinders, a homogeneous system of linear algebraic equations is obtained. From this system, with the use of the scattering matrices, a simple dispersion equation is derived for determining the phase velocities of plane waves. The stability of the numerical solution to the dispersion equation with respect to the number of cylinders is investigated. The phase velocities of quasi-homogeneous and inhomogeneous waves in a pipe are numerically calculated and analyzed for different velocities of a moving medium and different laws of flow velocity variation along the radius. It is shown that the variation that occurs in the phase velocity of a homogeneous plane wave in a pipe due to the motion of the medium is identical to the mean flow velocity for different laws of flow velocity variation along the radius. For inhomogeneous plane waves, the phase velocity increment exceeds the mean flow velocity several times and depends on both the law of wave amplitude distribution along the radius and the law of the flow velocity variation along the radius.