It's not...wait, it IS rocket science!

At Brigham Young University a general education course introduces students to the basic descriptive acoustic principles of music, speech, and audio. A third of this course focuses on the physics of musical instrument families. Three of these families include bowed string, plucked string, and struck string instruments. The concepts of driven systems and freely vibrating systems are taught, including the consequences of these excitation conditions. A hands-on lab for the course enables students to explore how the length, density, and tension of the string change the fundamental frequency. An in-class demonstration highlights the role of inharmonicity on the partial frequency values for these string instrument families. The combination of hands-on activity and demonstration aids the students in comprehending the basic acoustic principles behind string instruments and the reason for varying levels of inharmonicity between these instrument families.

A theoretical model for the ground reflection from a correlated, extended source and including atmospheric turbulence [K. L. Gee et al., Proc. Mtgs. Acoust. 22, 040001 (2014)] is used to correct spectra measured over snow-covered terrain during a horizontal solid rocket motor firing. A sensitivity analysis reveals that at moderate distances, the relative sound pressure level changes are more sensitive to ground effective flow resistivity and microphone height, whereas at long range, the turbulence parameters and ground impedance have greater impact.

Near-field characterization of the acoustical environment near rockets has often involved extrapolating far-field measurements. However, because far-field amplitude data reveals only limited information about source characteristics, a vector intensity measurement system and analysis package has been developed to examine source features more directly. This paper describes the development of the measurement and analysis capability and its application to a horizontal firing of a GEM-60 solid propellant rocket motor firing conducted at ATK Space Systems near Promontory, Utah. An analysis of near-field intensity data provides insight both into the spatial extent and principal radiation lobe as a function of frequency. For 50 Hz, the far-field spectral peak frequency in the maximum radiation direction, the dominant source region derived from tracing the near-field intensity vectors spans 17-32 nozzle diameters, with peak radiation at ~68°. At high frequencies, the radiation results from a more contracted region that occurs farther upstream and is directed at about ~85°. These results point to the potential utility of near-field vector intensity measurements, in part because the near-field environments represented do not agree with historical far-field data-based models.

In this paper, quantitative understanding of a frequency-domain nonlinearity indicator is developed. The indicator is derived from an ensemble-averaged, frequency-domain version of the generalized Burgers equation, which can be rearranged in order to directly compare the effects of nonlinearity, absorption, and geometric spreading on the pressurespectrum level with frequency and distance. The nonlinear effect is calculated using pressure-squared-pressure quadspectrum. Further theoretical development has given an expression for the role of the normalized quadspectrum, referred to as Q/S by Morfey and Howell [AIAA J. 19, 986–992 (1981)], in the spatial rate of change of the pressurespectrum level. To explore this finding, an investigation of the change in level for initial sinusoids propagating as plane waves through inviscid and thermoviscous media has been conducted. The decibel change with distance, calculated through Q/S, captures the growth and decay of the harmonics and indicates that the most significant changes in level occur prior to sawtooth formation. At large distances, the inviscid case results in a spatial rate of change that is uniform across all harmonics. For thermoviscous media, large positive nonlinear gains are observed but offset by absorption, which leads to a greater overall negative spatial rate of change for higher harmonics.

Correlation analyses of ground-based acoustic-pressure measurements of noise from a tethered F-22A provide insights into the sound-field characteristics with position and engine condition. Time-scaled single-point (auto)correlation functions show that, to the side of the nozzle exit, the temporal-correlation envelope decays rapidly, whereas the envelope decays more slowly in the maximum radiation region and farther downstream. This type of spatial variation has been previously attributed to a transition from fine- to large-scale mixing noise in laboratory-scale jets. Two-point space–time (cross) correlation functions demonstrate that noise from a single engine operating at intermediate power is similar to that from a heated, convectively subsonic laboratory-scale jet, whereas additional features are seen at afterburner, relative to supersonic laboratory jets. A complementary coherence analysis provides estimates of coherence lengths as a function of frequency and location. Acoustic coherence lengths across the ground microphone array are used to analyze one-dimensional, equivalent-source-coherence lengths obtained from the DAMAS-C beamforming algorithm. The source coherence reaches its maximum downstream of the maximum source level, suggesting that uncorrelated sources meaningfully contribute to the dominant source region. In addition to revealing further the nature of the sound field near an advanced tactical engine, the characteristics seen should be useful as a phenomenological comparison point for those trying to model military-scale results both experimentally and numerically.