A Comparative Study of Four Impedance Eduction Methodologies Using Several Test Liners

A comparative study of four commonly used impedance eduction methods is presented for a range of liner structures and test conditions. Two of the methods are restricted to uniform flow while the other two accommodate both uniform and boundary layer flows. Measurements on five liner structures (a rigid-wall insert, a ceramic tubular liner, a wire mesh liner, a low porosity conventional liner, and a high porosity conventional liner) are obtained using the NASA Langley Grazing Flow Impedance Tube. The educed impedance of each liner is presented for forty-two test conditions (three Mach numbers and fourteen frequencies). In addition, the effects of moving the acoustic source from upstream to downstream and the refractive effects of the mean boundary layer on the wire mesh liner are investigated. The primary conclusions of the study are that: (1) more accurate results are obtained for the upstream source, (2) the uniform flow methods produce nearly identical impedance spectra at and below Mach 0.3 but significant scatter in the educed impedance occurs at the higher Mach number, (3) there is better agreement in educed impedance among the methods for the conventional liners than for the rigid-wall insert, ceramic, or wire mesh liner, and (4) the refractive effects of the mean boundary layer on the educed impedance of the wire mesh liner are generally small except at Mach 0.5.