Large eddy simulation of serration effects on an ultra-high-bypass-ratio engine exhaust jet

Serrated jet nozzles are considered to be an efficient and practical passive control approach for jet noise. However, some fundamental mechanisms of serration effects on jet noise are not fully understood, especially in terms of the sound source. In this paper, a high-fidelity simulation framework using large-eddy simulation (LES) is demonstrated to predict near-field turbulence and far-field acoustics from an ultra-high-bypass-ratio engine with round and serrated nozzles. Far-field sound is predicted using Ffowcs Willams–Hawkings (FWH) integration. The results show that the serrated nozzle increases mixing near the nozzle and hence the turbulence decay rate, reducing the turbulence level downstream. The serrations shift the energy from the low frequencies to the high frequencies and decrease overall sound pressure levels by about 3 dB over the low-frequency range. Sound sources are analysed based on fourth-order space–time correlations. There are six major source components ($R_{1111}$, $R_{2222}$, $R_{3333}$, $R_{1313}$, $R_{1212}$, and $R_{2323}$) inside the jet shear layers. The serrations are able to reduce the amplitude of these source terms, causing them to decay rapidly to a level below the round nozzle jet within 2D downstream of the nozzle.