The aerodynamic and acoustic properties of supersonic elliptic and circular jets are experimentally investigated. The jets are perfectly expanded with an exit Mach number of approximately 1.5 and are operated in the Reynolds number range of 25 000 to 50 000. The reduced Reynolds number facilitates the use of conventional hot-wire anemometry and a glow discharge excitation technique which preferentially excites the varicose or flapping modes in the jets. In order to simulate the high-velocity and low-density effects of heated jets, helium is mixed with the air jets. This allows the large-scale structures in the jet shear layer to achieve a high enough convective velocity to radiate noise through the Mach wave emission process.

Experiments in the present work focus on comparisons between the cold and simulated heated jet conditions and on the beneficial aeroacoustic properties of the elliptic jet. When helium is added to the jet, the instability wave phase velocity is found to approach or exceed the ambient sound speed. The radiated noise is also louder and directed at a higher angle from the jet axis. In addition, near-field hot-wire spectra are found to match the far-field acoustic spectra only for the helium/air mixture case. These results demonstrate that there are significant differences between unheated and heated asymmetric jets in the Mach 1.5 speed range, many of which have been found previously for circular jets. The elliptic jet was also found to radiate less noise than the round jet at comparable operating conditions.