Researching supersonic jet noise at afterburning conditions

We're here at the Advanced Propulsion and Power Laboratory out at the Corporate Research Center. And we're going to discuss my project that's investigating supersonic jet noise at after burning conditions. This project is motivated by the fact that Navy personnel have to work on aircraft carriers around large amounts of jet noise emanating from the jet engines after and during takeoff. We were successfully able to match the noise spectrum of actual jet engine noise spectrum that was measured by a colleague of mine over in BYU. It's been pretty exciting. In terms of noise measurements, We put basically a polar arc outside about 60 diameters from the jet, and we measure the noise that's emanating from the jet, because we put quite a few microphones out there, we can create the spatial spectral maps. We can see which direction the noise is radiating dominantly. We can do a lot of advanced diagnostics using those microphones. Now we have a very unique facility. To my knowledge, there's not another facility in the world that can do jet noise experiments at these type of conditions. Furthermore, there's a lot of OEMs that, it's very costly to test noise reduction technologies on full engine scale. Now there's an opportunity for those OEM's to use our facility to test at a much smaller scale to save money before they go to the actual final engine testing. That's one thing that's unique about Virginia Tech is we do do a lot of relevant industry testing. We even have full jet engines out at the airport, and this is more of a live scale set up.