  In this paper the propagation of acoustic plane waves in turbulent, fully
developed flow is studied by means of an experimental investigation carried out
in a straight, smooth-walled duct.The presence of a coherent perturbation, such
as an acoustic wave in a turbulent confined flow, generates the oscillation of
the wall shear stress. In this circumstance a shear wave is excited and
superimposed on the sound wave. The turbulent shear stress is modulated by the
shear wave and the wall shear stress is strongly affected by the turbulence.
From the experimental point of view, it results in a measured damping strictly
connected to the ratio between the thickness of the acoustic sublayer, which is
frequency dependent, and the thickness of the viscous sublayer of the turbulent
mean flow, the last one being dependent on the Mach number. By reducing the
turbulence, the viscous sublayer thickness increases and the wave propagation
is mainly dominated by convective effects. In the present work, the damping and
wall impedance have been extracted from the measured complex wavenumber, which
represents the most important parameter used to characterize the wave
propagation. An experimental approach, referred to as iterative plane wave
decomposition, has been used in order to obtain the results. The investigations
have been carried out at low Mach number turbulent flows, low Helmholtz numbers
and low shear wavenumbers. The aim is to overcome a certain lack of
experimental results found by the authors of the most recent models for the
plane wave propagation in turbulent flows, such as Knutsson et al. (The effect
of turbulence damping on acoustic wave propagation in tubes, Journal of Sound
and Vibration, Vol. 329, No. 22, 2010), and Weng et al. (The attenuation of
sound by turbulence in internal flows, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America 133(6), 2013).
