Wall pressure fluctuations beneath supersonic turbulent boundary layers

The structure of the wall pressure field beneath supersonic adiabatic turbulent boundary layers is analyzed by means of direct numerical simulations at free-stream Mach number M(infinity) = 2, 3, 4, spanning a relatively large range of Reynolds numbers. The data reported in the paper, which include wall pressure fluctuations intensities, frequency spectra, space-time correlations, and convection velocities, show that when pressure is scaled by the wall shear stress, most statistics well conform to low-speed findings, contradicting the conclusions of previous experimental studies. Genuine compressibility effects are found to provide a small contribution to the magnitude of the wall pressure fluctuations, their influence being limited to the high-frequency end of the spectra, where a systematic increase with the Mach number is observed. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3622773]