A Formulation for Mean Flow Effects on Sound Radiation from Rectangular Baffled Plates with Arbitrary Boundary Conditions

A general formulation of the sound radiation from fluid-loaded rectangular baffled plates with arbitrary boundary conditions has been developed by Berry et al. (JASA, Vol. 90, No. 4, Pt. 2, 1991). In this paper, an extension of this formulation to inviscid, uniform subsonic flow is considered. The analysis is based on a variational formulation for the transverse vibrations of the plate and the use of the extended, to uniformly moving media, form of the Helmholtz integral equation. The formulation shows explicitly the effect of the flow in terms of added mass, and radiation resistance. Furthermore, it avoids the difficult problem of integration in the complex domain, typical of the wavenumber transform approaches to fluid-loading problems. Comparison of the acoustic radiation impedance with existing studies supports the validity of the approach. The details of the formulation and its numerical implementation is exposed and a discussion of the flow effects on the radiation impedance of a rectangular piston is presented. It is shown that subsonic mean flow increases the modal radiation resistance at low frequencies and affects added mass more strongly than it affects radiation resistance.