An experimental active flow control study was conducted involving excitation of a tabletop planar turbulent jet with a high frequency piezoelectric actuator. The excitation frequencies considered corresponded to the dissipative subrange of turbulent kinetic energy and were orders of magnitude greater than classical shear layer instability modes. Single-wire and dual-wire hot wire probes were used to determine how excitation induces alterations to bulk flow quantities as well as nonlinear interactions. Differences in flow receptivity to high frequency excitation were investigated by varying the development length of the turbulent jet at a Reynolds number of 8,700 and Strouhal number of 21.3. Excitation of developed turbulent flow yielded larger increases in the energy dissipation rate and higher magnitude velocity power spectrum peaks at the forcing frequency than undeveloped turbulent flow. Further tests with excitation of reduced mean velocity flow at a Reynolds number of 6,600 and a Strouhal number of 27.8 demonstrated that high frequency forcing resulted in transfer of energy from large to small scales in the turbulent kinetic energy spectrum. This phenomenon appeared to support past literature that indicated that the mechanics of high frequency forcing are fundamentally different from conventional instability-based forcing.

Theoretical arguments are presented to support these experimental observations where it is shown that coupling between the applied forcing and background turbulent fluctuations is enhanced.  An eddy viscosity model first proposed under the assumption of instability-based forcing was shown to be an effective approximation for the experimental measurements presented here in which the flow was forced directly at turbulence scales. Dimensional analysis of the coupling between the induced oscillations and the turbulent fluctuations supported experimental findings that receptivity to excitation was increased for forced flow with higher turbulent kinetic energy, higher excitation amplitude, and lower energy dissipation rate. This study is the first to present such results which validate a model that offers theoretical insight into flow control mechanics when directly forcing small scale turbulent fluctuations.