EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION ON SOUND SPEED PROPAGATING THROUGH HIGH SPEED AERATED FLOW IN OPEN CHANNEL

EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION ON SOUND SPEED PROPAGATING THROUGH HIGH SPEED AERATED FLOW IN OPEN CHANNEL

An experiment concerning the sound propaga-tion in aerated open channel flow was designed and conductedin a variable slope chute. The acquisition of sound data wasdone by the hydro-phones installed into the bottom wall of thechute. The data were analyzed and processed by the tape re-corder and a 3562A analyzer. The primary experimetal resultsindicated that the sound speed in aerated flow is varied with the air concentration and highly lower than each of the soundspeed in pure water or air. As released by the derived theoryformula, the minimum sound of 24m/s in aerated flow hap-pened when the air concentration achieved to 50%. This resultshows that the compressibility of high speed aerated flowshould be considered when the air concentration is near to50%. A criterion of compressibility of high speed aerated flowwas also giv. En in this paper.