A standardized approach to identify nonlinearity in fighter jet noise during ground run-ups

High-intensity military sources (explosions, gunfire, fighter jet noise. . . ) fall out of the scope of linearity-based commercial software and international standards. On top of its intrinsic complexity (high temperature supersonic jet, shocks, turbulent eddies, etc), fighter jet engine noise bears additional challenges: turbulent surrounding flow, airframe interference, directionality and tonal components typical of rotating equipment. The absence of a suitable metric to determine the boundary of the nonlinear propagation region can lead to costly mispredictions in the exposure levels for noise abatement procedures and the personnel's safety. The derivative skewness of the time domain signal used as an indicator of spectral reshaping proved effective in setting a threshold to the generation of acoustic nonlinearity for seven firearms. Its application to aircraft noise is here discussed, in order to verify the claim of persistence of nonlinear behaviour at large distances and set the foundations for a common framework contemplating the peculiarities of each military noise source. The experimental data was collected during a series of static ground run-ups of an F-16 military jet aircraft. The results from five engine regimes and two propagation paths are compared with the findings from firearms, existing literature and the solution of a nonlinear acoustic propagation solver.