The effect of incoming boundary layer thickness and Mach number on linear and nonlinear Rossiter modes in open cavity flows

The Rossiter modes of an open cavity were studied using bi-global linear analysis, local instability analysis and nonlinear numerical simulations. Rossiter modes are normally seen only for short cavities; hence, in the study, the length over depth ratio was two. We focus on the critical region; hence, the Reynolds numbers based on cavity depth were close to 1000. We investigated the effect of the ratio boundary layer thickness to cavity depth, a parameter often overlooked in the literature. Increasing this ratio is destabilizing and increases the number of unstable Rossiter modes. Local instability analysis revealed that the hierarchy of unstable modes was governed by the mixing in the cavity opening. The effect of Mach number was also studied for thin and thick boundary layers. Compressibility had a very destabilizing effect at low Mach numbers. Analysis of the Rossiter mode eigenfunctions indicated that the acoustic feedback scaled to Ma(3) and explained the strong destabilizing effect of compressibility at low Mach numbers. At moderate Mach numbers, the instability either saturated with Mach number or had an irregular dependence on it. This was associated with resonances between Rossiter modes and acoustic cavity modes. The analysis explained why this irregular dependence occurred only for higher-order Rossiter modes. In this parameter region, three-dimensional modes are either stable or marginally unstable. Two-dimensional simulations were performed to evaluate how much of the nonlinear regime could be captured by the linear stability results. The instability was triggered by the 10(-13) flow solver noise floor. The simulations initially agreed with linear theory and later became nonlinearly saturated. The simulations showed that, as the flow becomes more unstable, an increasingly more complex final stage is reached. Yet, the spectra present distinct tones that are not far from linear predictions, with the thin boundary layer cases being closer to empirical predictions. The final stage, in general, was dominated by first Rossiter mode, even though the second one was the most unstable linearly. It seems this may be associated with nonlinear boundary layer thickening, which favors lower frequency in the mixing layer, or vortex pairing of the second Rossiter mode. The spectra in the final stages are well described by the mode R1 and a cascade of nonlinearly generated harmonics, with little reminiscence of the linear instability. (AU)