Experimental simulation of turbulent boundary layer induced vibrations by using a synthetic array

Of particular interest is the experimental feasibility of replacing wind tunnel measurements with a substitute experiment to simulate Turbulent Boundary Layer (TBL) induced vibrations. This paper describes the development of an experimental procedure to address this issue. The proposed approach is based on the concept of uncorrelated wall pressure plane waves, which is introduced as a prelude to this study. Concretely, an array of acoustic monopoles can be used to generate these wall pressure plane waves. To this end, the design parameters of the array are studied numerically. However, when dealing with experimental applications, the number of monopoles required being prohibitive, the principle of synthetic array is applied instead. This technique allows simulating the effect of an array of acoustic monopoles from sequential measurements. To assess the validity of the proposed approach, the whole procedure is applied to simulate TBL induced vibrations of a thin elastic plate. The results obtained are in good agreement with those obtained from random vibration theory.